Part 3 – I am a descendant of a world lost in the mists of time
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My heritage is a patchwork of societies. It is the glitzy French Riviera, the bleak Belgium of coal mines, the poor France of subsistence farms and small factories, the grey Paris of middle-class suburbs. All of these are relatable. You can read about it, learn about it, visit it on week-ends and take pictures. They are all heritage. Only, the material one.
Africa? That is something else. It is woven in my psyche.
If you can picture Congo, it is probably some version of “Tintin in Congo”, if you are less than 80. If not, war, child soldiers and blood diamonds. Or you are a history buff or a decolonialisation expert and then you know about the independence Albert I, Lumumba, Tchombe and Mobutu.
To me, I was soaked in it two months every summer for a straight 16 years stretch. Living in a society revived by words, allusions, conversations and yearly visits of other ex-colonials.
It was not the real Africa. I never lived there. I never visited Jadotville/Likasi. I was born in 1965, 5 years after the independence, 8 years after my grandparents travelled back. But everyone in my matriarchal family was born in Africa, lived there for decades. In unguarded remarks, you could hear the unconscious thoughts: Congo was their country, our country. There was never the shadow of a doubt. A society that had packed and vanished within two weeks according to historians. They came back without fanfare, but no refugees either. Just a national and international embarrassment best forgotten as fast as possible. Within 5 years, they only existed again for the summer.
That bitter sweet taste made the narrative all the more romantic. A society that only exists in sepia and grey.
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1949 – The family on Lobito Road, Angola
Coming from a place that does not exist, imagine that! No trudging visit to the venerated locations of the ancestors. No running commentary of what Aunty X did when. Instead, a yearly pilgrimage to a museum curated by the Family: the Mansion. Claviers, the one true reliquary of memories of Congo. Oh, yes, there were many other potential places of ancestors worship across France: Grancey-le-Château, Dijon, Le Bourget du Lac, Jura or Savoy. But all that had been expedited early in a whistle-stop trip around France to places and people we had to see. But did not really need to know. After all, both my grandparents and my parents had fled these places and people.
Africa was by association where they had all built a better life. It was escape and refuge.
And what an imaginary place it was! Away from the dreary, rainy Europe of chalk boards and school gowns, Africa was all open savannah, herds and exotic adventures just around every corner. My grandparents have moved around as geology took them to find ore and mines. Why they had have to leave in the end was never talked about. Just lingering regret, fondness for the place and silences. An unspoken, hieratic tragedy that united a tight family cell.
It made the Family different, as who else but the handful of us still had any idea about it?
The Belgian ex-colonials? A secret, international, diverse fraternity. They would forever be in Congo. Never “from”, always “in” Africa. It was my grandmother, her three daughters, and a few mysterious people that would pop up once a year. And in visits and open conversations, Jadotville was a world of international misfits, Russian Duchesses, Polish Jews, mercenaries, gays, lesbians, all in open couples. A society portrait snatched from conversations. Visits were always prepared at length. Name, job back then, African anecdotes, and degree of closeness to the Family laid out in excruciating details to make sure that the visit would proceed as if we last met yesterday.
A world that only existed in these conversations by now, but still my only real origins’ story. A social theatre of shadows.
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Less than 10 years after independence, the colonial societies were erased. And maybe that’s fair enough. Retribution of some kind or other. They simply disappeared. My origin story could never exist outside of my family. At school and later, I was expected to merge with geographies, timelines and collective memories of others. Home is where the heart is. It is a location traceable and demonstrable. Home has been there since the Stone Age, and it will still be in centuries to come. Mine is not.
I am the descendant of a world lost in the mists of time. This shapes the way I look at society.
You can describe colonials with many words. You can and should judge them. Some of what they did, most of what they did maybe, will remain a blot for the ages. But colonials were also outsiders within their own societies. If they ever were an elite, it was over there. Over here? They were the odd-ones out. The ones that left. To get rich? Not really in my case. Many of them left for the space, for freedom from the props and dues of society, for a life as they saw fit. Outcasts.
They, we, lived beside society.
And that meant also a particular set of values. Resilience, self-reliance and a non-negotiable set of moral values to survive whether in the veldt, in the family, at school or in society. Never preaching, always living by it. It is not selfishness or egotism, it is quite the contrary. It is the frontier spirit of knowing that the buck only ever stops with you, the frontier solidarity of the trail. Generosity when it does matter, acceptance of the other, curiosity and openness.
The frontier, also my heritage.
More than the mementoes, that is how Africa shaped me, how it framed my mind, ever more than what school, parents or grandparents told me to think and say.
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