Award-winning filmmaker explores her family’s dark colonial past in Rwanda

The multi-award-winning Greetings From The Colony premieres on Wednesday, 8 April 2015 at 9pm WAT on Witness, Al Jazeera’s observational documentary strand.

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.

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.”

Greetings From The Colony, which has won five international awards, premieres on Al Jazeera on Wednesday, 8 April at 9pm WAT, followed by screenings on 9 April at 1pm WAT, 10 April at 3am WAT, and 11 April at 7am WAT.