Métis/Mulâtre, Mulato, Mulatto, Negro, Moreno, Mundele Kaki, Black

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PB371A-06 PB371-Hintzen-v1.cls July 13, 2003 12:47 Char Count= 0
Métis/Mulâtre, Mulato, Mulatto, Negro, Moreno, Mundele Kaki, Black, ... . 95
to Germany. He was treated with a great deal of respect, particularly by
the “guards” (euphemistically called éducateurs, “educators,” to distinguish
them from the “professors” who taught classes during the day). This was in
recognition of the status of his father and the fear of diplomatic consequences
stemming from his ill treatment. A driver in a Mercedes-Benz picked him up
every Friday afternoon to spend the weekend in Brussels with relatives. All
of us, the black kids, were very proud of him and of the status of his parents.
His presence among us served as a contestation of our inferior status in the
eyes of whites.
The black students attempted to assert their humanity and to combat the
racism rampant in our school through racial solidarity. A group of white
students, mostly comprising children of former colonial officials, organized
a campaign of aggression against the nonwhite students in the school. Many
of them were born in the Belgian Congo, where they had spent a significant
portion of their childhood. With the advent of Congolese Independence,
their parents were forced to move back to Belgium. This filled them with
resentment against the Congolese population in general. Such resentment
was expressed in a campaign of aggression directed against the Congolese
and métis children of the boarding school. They mocked us by repeating
the usual racist attitudes expressed against Congolese by Belgian adults of
the time: “They’ve got their independence way too early!” “Yesterday they
were still jumping up in the trees, and now they want to be presidents,
ministers, and captains of enterprise!”“They’re going to destroy everything
we’ve taken so long and so many efforts to build up.” “They’re just good to
dance and party; they don’t know what work is,” and so on. One of their
principal targets was the Congolese president, Mobutu. Most of them were
able to speak Lingala and/or Swahili and sometimes would insult one of the
kids in our group in one of these languages. This would always end up in a
major fistfight—occasionally quite bloody—in which the educators had to
intervene.
The kids in our group would respond to their insults with statements
that celebrated black pride and that vilified European colonialism. We made
numerous uses of the slogans of the civil rights movements in the United
States as well as of the mouvementpourleretouràl’authenticité (movement
for the return to African authenticity) of President Mobutu, whom we were
then defending as one of our heroes. Mobutu’s authenticité had led to the
adoption of a series of nationalist measures: the renaming of the Congo
as Zaire; the renaming of cities whose names were celebrating the Belgian
colonial enterprise with Zairian names; the prohibition of using Christian
first names; the adoption of the rule forbidding the use of ties that had
become the symbol per excellence of the European; the replacement of the
Western style suit by the Abacos (term taken from the French expression à