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

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, ... . 91
Nziem 1998, 561–664; see also the recent film by Raoul Peck, Lumumba), the
situation became too dangerous for him to stay: some of his workers refused
to accept his authority anymore. At the end of January 1961, the Compagnie
Africaine Cooreman sent a helicopter with Belgian para-commandos to his
rescue. He made the decision to take the rest of his family to Belgium.
The helicopter took my father, my mother, my brother Guy, and me to
Leopoldville, where we stayed for three days before departing for Brussels.
Our presence in Belgium was fraught with enormous complications
brought on by financial hardship, my mother’s inability to speak the French
language, and the extreme racism that met us upon our arrival. My father’s
mother died. We were forced to live in the home of two of my father’s sisters.
All these factors combined to produce considerable tension that resulted in
the breakup of my parents’ relationship. My mother, who was alone during
the day with her younger children, felt alienated and rejected. According to
my father, she began to suffer a series of psychological crises. Her behavior
deteriorated to the point where “she had to be admitted to a psychiatric
institution” in Brussels. It was there where their fifth child, my brother Yves,
was born. A few months after his birth, my father made the decision to
send my mother back to the Congo. She returned alone, without the children.
According to my father, he made that decision in consultation with
his brothers because her condition was not improving. Yves was six months
old. I was two and a half years old when my mother left.
Little Métis in Belgian Boarding Schools
The departure of our mother left me, and my siblings, with a void in our
life. This was compounded even further when my father decided, for financial
reasons, to enroll us—as soon as we were “old enough”—in state and
Catholic boarding schools. Unlike the expensive private boarding schools
attended by the children of well-off American families, these schools were
state-funded. As a result, tuition costs were extremely low. They were attended
primarily by the children of the working and lower middle classes.
Because of differences in age and gender, my eldest brother, Philippe, and
my sister Annie went to separate boarding schools. Guy and I usually attended
the same school. Yves (my younger brother) was taken care of by
one of my father’s sisters, who enrolled him in a special education boarding
school. This decision to enroll him in the special education system had to
do, apparently, with the “special circumstances” of his birth.
I was four years old when I was enrolled in my first boarding school in
the city of Namur (located in the francophone part of Belgium). The school
was run by Catholic nuns of the order of Mont Saint Jean de Dieu. Guy—
who was six years old—and I were the only nonwhite children enrolled at