In Greetings From The Colony, Belgian filmmaker Nathalie Borgers
explores a family mystery, kept secret for 80 years: her mixed-race
aunt she didn’t know existed.
She is my aunt. But until 15 years ago, I had no idea she existed,” says Nathalie.
Nathalie’s grandfather, Leon, was a Belgian agent working in
colonial Rwanda in the 1920s. Like many colonialists, he married a
Rwandan woman, who bore him a daughter, Suzanne, and two sons. At the
end of his term, he met and married a young Belgian woman, returning
with her and four-year-old Suzanne to Belgium – abandoning his
Rwandan wife and sons.
“Suzanne’s father is my grandfather. She is my aunt. But until 15
years ago, I had no idea she existed,” says Nathalie. “When I
learned about her, by accident, I realised that the secret dominating
her life was not only a family taboo but also a national one.”
In Greetings From The Colony, Nathalie explores Suzanne’s story of
growing up without her mother, in a family of denial, in a foreign
country with a dark colonial past. “Did you ever talk about
Africa?” Nathalie asks in the documentary. “Never,” Suzanne
whispers regretfully.
While trying to re-unite Suzanne with her brothers who were left
behind, Nathalie discovers that her aunt’s case isn’t isolated:
Suzanne is just one of hundreds of children who were removed from
their homeland, while her brothers were just two of the many more who
were simply abandoned.
“Mixed-race children born during the colonial era embodied a deep
contradiction,” says Nathalie. “Intimate relationships between
white and black people were rampant in a society built on the idea of
the white race’s superiority and civilising mission. The children
born from these mixed relationships do not appear in Belgium’s
colonial historiography. Yet many were repatriated, often abducted
from their mothers, as independence approached, in order to ‘save
the white part of their heritage.’”
When Nathalie first contacted Suzanne, she was surprised but agreed to
meet. “She told me that a few years earlier she had started to write
a book in memory of her late father, called, All the Things I Wanted
to Tell You. When I suggested making a documentary about her story,
she saw it as a way to continue this unfinished work.”
Watch and embed the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
For more information, visit
http://www.aljazeera.com/