Telling stories that cannot be told: remembering mothers and daughters in métis narratives from Rwanda
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".