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

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P1: GIG PB371A-06 PB371-Hintzen-v1.cls July 13, 2003 12:47 Char Count= 0 88 . Jean Muteba Rahier raise his younger siblings. He was unable to pursue an education beyond high school. In 1945, when he was eighteen, an older friend of his who was serving in the Congo raised in his mind the possibility of colonial service. As a result, he signed his first three-year term contract in 1947 with the Palm Oil Mill Madaíl, a company installed in the Belgian Congo by Portuguese migrants from Angola. He eventually became chef de zone or area manager for the company in the Bandundu region. His first few months were spent learning about the business of planting palm trees and producing palm oil. He also used the opportunity to learn the Kikongo language—the major African language spoken in the Bandundu region. He enjoyed his position enormously and became financially secure. When he returned to Belgium after his first three-year tour of duty was up, he was able to take his mother, who had never left Belgium, on a trip to Switzerland. When he returned to the Congo for a second term, he decided to leave his job at Madaíltobecome the field manager on a sawmill project funded by two of his colonial friends in the forest region around Yuki, in the northern part of the Kasai Province. At the end of about two years, for a series of reasons too complex to explain here, the project collapsed. My father found himself broke and without a job just before the beginning of his second six-month vacation period in Belgium. It was while he was in the forest region around Yuki that he met my mother, Muswamba. Her father, Muteba, owned a small store on the bank of the Kasai River, not far away from the forest concession that my father managed. He had five children with her. I am their fourth child, the last one born in the Congo. My younger brother was born in Brussels in 1961. My mother is a Luba or Muluba. Tshiluba is her first language. She always refused to teach it to my father. They usually spoke in Kikongo, a language in which they are both fluent. For his third and fourth terms in the Congo, which ended abruptly in January 1961 (seven months after Congolese independence), my father signed a contract with the Compagnie Africaine Cooreman (CAC), which specialized in the production and export of a series of different products including palm oil, vegetal fibers, and wood. In 1993, I recorded hours of conversations with my father about his life there for a book that I am writing on interracial intimacy in the Belgian Congo. Here are some excerpts from our conversations, which I have translated into English. Jean Muteba: So, during all of these years of your first terms, you never had girlfriends or lovers? JeanSr.:Oh,... that’s another story! No, no.... Ihadsome;Ievenhadquitea few.But... Jean Muteba: They were always black women or you also had affairs with young (white) Belgian women? Jean Sr.: Black women, of course!
P1: GIG PB371A-06 PB371-Hintzen-v1.cls July 13, 2003 12:47 Char Count= 0 Métis/Mulâtre, Mulato, Mulatto, Negro, Moreno, Mundele Kaki, Black, ... . 89 Jean Muteba: So, our mother wasn’t the first black woman with whom you had an affair . . . ? Jean Sr.: No, no, no. She came into my life much later. I met her when I began the sawmill project along the Kasai River. No, obviously, I had girlfriends before. But it was without any consequence, no child, and no disease, nothing at all.... Jean Muteba: Yes, but how did you feel in these relationships with black women, in the context of the colonial society of the Belgian Congo, which was after all based on segregation? With these relationships you were trespassing a border, weren’t you? Jean Sr.: The border, you could trespass it temporarily if you had a ménagère, as we called them. A ménagère was a black girl who lived with you, generally. This was particularly the case for the Belgians who lived in a far away place in the bush, like us. We sometimes found them in the tribe in which we were working, or in a neighboring tribe, or in the family of one of our workers. Jean Muteba: How did you get these women to come to your place? How did their families react? Jean Sr.: It was exclusively for sexual intercourse that at firstwelookedforthem. Then, if you got along well with her it lasted longer. The families accepted that very well. The only problematic thing was to try to seduce the wife of one of the Africans. In that case, it could even become violent, or else they were going to complain to the agent who represented the Belgian state in the district in which you lived. Most of the time, that agent also had a ménagère. Then, he had to intervene. He had a lot of reasons for doing so. First of all, he had to administer justice. He played the role of mediator, let’s say.Tobeinconflict with a jealous husband who was living in one of the villages in which you worked was very bad for the job, even worse it if he was one of your workers. No, that, you had to avoid it at any cost. In any case, the choice of available African women was varied enough to be able to avoid that kind of situation. Jean Muteba: Yes, but... what kind of relationship did you have with these women? Was it really only sexual? Jean Sr.: Some of these women who were quite... let’s say... very attractive, were also not entirely stupid. That is why we chose more willingly girls who were in the process of evolution; that is to say that with these there were possibilities of contacts that did not exist with a savage girl who, for instance, didn’t know anything else than the customs of her tribe. In that case, the dialogues were quite poor. . . . They lived with their white man. Usually, they had, near the white man’s house, their small kitchen that the white man had had his boys construct, so that she could cook her own meals. But the white man, in general, and that was my case, had his boys to cook for him. It was a regime of separated kitchens! Why? Because... shecookedherownmeals. I bought her fish, game meat when there was some, and things of the sort. Some had already lived near or with a white man before and could, for instance; make bread and other things. But if not, that was it. The boys were there. The boys were guys who had gotten some style from previously working for another white man. But it was rare that you could find somebody like that in the bush. In another conversation, while he was explaining to me the circumstances of the birth of his first child—my brother Philippe—I went back to the issue
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Métis/Mulâtre, Mulato, Mulatto, Negro, Moreno, Mundele Kaki, Black

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