Telling stories that cannot be told: remembering mothers and daughters in Métis narratives from Rwanda

On the eve of independence in Ruanda-Urundi, hundreds of Métis children were taken from Catholic missions and flown to Belgium where they would be fostered, adopted, or sent to local boarding schools. These illegitimate children of white European fathers and Black African mothers were viewed by the colonial authorities as ‘children of sin’. Most of the Métis never saw their birth mothers again and remained illegitimate, unacknowledged by their white European fathers. In 2019, the Belgian government issued a formal apology for the abduction of these children but, for almost sixty years, the stories of the Métis and their mothers had been conveniently forgotten. This article discusses creative attempts to tell the missing stories of the Métis and their mothers by two mixed-‘race’ authors born in Rwanda: Georges Kamanayo, also a filmmaker, was removed from his mother in the late 1950s and taken to Belgium for adoption; Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse imagines the story of an ageing Métis woman with dementia in her novel, Consolée. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of ‘critical fabulation’, we consider the role of creative works in repositioning Métis mothers and daughters at the centre of their own history and telling stories that cannot be told.