My Father: Story Of An Ally In Progress
From 1945 to 2024, a father-daughter relationship in evolution
Writing about my family is always something I intended to do, but procrastination got the best of me until I read
the writer behind the newsletter in which she recollects many of the racist episodes she has gone through. Her post, Message For My Readers, is today’s story catalyst. I was particularly touched by her message as she was telling how one of her readers wrote that they stopped paying for her newsletter because they didn’t feel comfortable with how she wrote and would upgrade their subscription again should her writing make them feel comfortable again. People like that reader are allies to make themselves feel good and hear people tell how good of a person they are. But allyship isn’t that. Allyship makes one feel uncomfortable because it triggers you to challenge your foundations, what you thought was right or normal or didn’t even consider. That is why I am telling you my father’s story. I hope in it, you’ll be able to see that despite being a loving and boastful parent (because he has never been humble about us), he is far from being the perfect ally, yet works towards it, even at almost 79.“From 1945 to 2024, a father-daughter relationship in evolution,” I, too, know the time frame is not right, but I picked it because my father - a history lover - has a knack for telling stories of his childhood, teenage years, and adult life with a unique flair. Every episode of his life is neatly described within a historical frame. No wonder when I interviewed him back in 2019 and asked him when he was born, he answered immediately, “I am a product of Free France.” It was his way to reference proudly he was almost a “bébé de la Libération” - children born on June 6th 1944, the date of operation D-Day for Allied forces - albeit being born exactly a year later, on June 25th. I told you, my dad loves adding depth or drama (the word that best fits the situation is yours) to his life story with historical facts.
My father and I didn’t meet before 1988, yet it feels like we were meant to be even before 1945. From 1924 to 1930, George Lepautremat, my dad’s maternal grandfather, was doing the maritime link between Africa, Latin America, and the USA. “For the longest time, he did Nantes- Bordeaux - Casablanca- Tenerife - Dakar - Conakry - Port Bouët (when Abidjan didn't exist yet). That is why at home, you had African masks, panther skins and postal cards of the places he went to," my father recalled. Born in La Roche-Sur-Yon, the main town of the region of Vendée, created in 1804 by Napoleon Ist, my father always said he felt immense boredom growing up in that city where each corner is an ode to the first French emperor. He dreamt of leaving the region at an early age, and the treasures his grandfather brought back from his trips planted that seed in him.
My father left France to work in Africa in 1977, and Cameroon was one of the countries he would have to go a lot. So when he told his maternal grandmother he was transferred to Douala, she showed him a picture of my great-grandfather going out from the Pagode, the mansion of Rudolph Manga Bell, the king of the Douala people. As he told me this, he added, amused, “As described in Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the Pagode became a brothel in the 20s. And my grandfather came out of that place when it wasn’t Manga Bell’s mansion anymore. I never told my grandmother what that place was.”
See like father, like daughter. I do like historical facts, too. And I like them even more when they are as uncanny as my great-grandfather visiting Douala - the city where my mother and I were born - and his grandson visiting it some sixty years later.
But before talking about why my father ended up working in West and Central Africa for almost thirty years, let’s go back to his formative years.
Each Sunday, my dad went to the cinema, and before each movie, they'd show news about colonies, especially during the war in Indochina and Algeria. But one specific event brought the news he saw on-screen home as he recalled, "I must have been 9 when I understood we had colonies. It was a Saturday morning, the 8th May 1954 to be exact, when my grandmother Maréchal came to tell me crying we lost Diên Biên Phû and that we should pray for the soldiers who were there. You had a lot of families in Vendée whose men went to fight there. I had a lot of friends at school whose brothers were fighting in Indochina and would tell about it." One thing struck me as I listened to my father: he was sobbing.
At that moment, I realised that, for him, it wasn't about the colonies but rather the French soldiers who died there. Seeing him this emotional made me understand he drew his sense of patriotism from these events. He then admitted that when he was a student at the Faculty of Political Sciences of Bordeaux, he always refused to give money to the communist students campaigning for North Vietnamese (now I’ve just noticed my dad never said the Vietnam War) in memory of the French soldiers who never made it back home.
As much as my dad felt extremely patriotic when talking about Indochina when asked about decolonisation, he said he didn't remember much. The process of decolonisation of the French colonies was put into action by General de Gaulle starting in 1958, and yet my father still believed in 1965 that his Togolese friend Yaovi Prosper Adodo, who studied with him, was French. About other Africans on his campus at the time, he said he had the impression they were all French, hence why, like many other people, he didn't understand what was happening in Algeria and why they didn't want French people there anymore.
This is the moment of the interview where my tone became sceptical as I grappled with the fact that my father, who studied Political Sciences AND studied at the Center for Sub-Saharan Africa Studies, could swallow the rhetoric that France granted these people French citizenship in the name of a civilising mission. But oddly, it also gave me a sense of relief as it explained why, as a child and to this day, some things my father says or does make me raise an eyebrow. I now have some context.
In 2019, the year we did that interview, my dad was 74 and I was 32. I started having a decolonial approach to what had been taught to me in my twenties, but expressing myself in my family was difficult. Not because I wasn’t allowed to but rather because I didn’t have the vocabulary, tools, and concepts to articulate my thoughts clearly. How can you confront someone on something intrinsically linked to your identity if you are, first and foremost, the most ill-informed about it? I needed to be well-prepared if I had to confront my father. Nowadays, there is more and more information about the colonial period in Africa, but when I was growing up, nobody would talk about it, and as a result, finding information about it wasn’t easy. So, interviewing my father gave me hindsight as, so far, I saw things only from my perspective as a child of the diaspora. Talking to him, as much as it made us both uncomfortable, allowed me to imagine what the average French person of his generation understood of French colonies with the caveat that my father was slightly different because of his personal story.
In 1977, my dad was 32 and set foot in Africa for the first time in his life. He arrived precisely in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. For some reason, I had in mind he came there in 1972. 'Why did I think you arrived there in 1972?' I asked. 'Because it was the year I started working for the BIAO,' he answered back. The BIAO abbreviation for Banque Internationale pour l'Afrique Occidentale (International Bank for West Africa) was founded in 1853 in Saint-Louis, Senegal, by Napoleon I's nephew, Napoleon III. My dad always spoke about his time there with nostalgia to the point it felt like he went on a “workcation”. As for me, the BIAO felt like it never collapsed in 1989, as many of France’s African ex-colonies banks were still called BIAO. I didn't realise until interviewing my dad that the BIAO was such an old colonial institution. If you wonder about my father’s work within it, his job consisted of restructuring banks close to collapsing, and following the decolonisation, there were aplenty. With that system, France held significant control over its ex-colonies financially and economically. So, my father worked in a colonial institution in what should have been the first decade of Africa’s post-colonial era. But even as the BIAO collapsed when we came back to Cameroon in the mid-90s, France still ruled the economy of most of its ex-colonies. As a child, I could tell that all my father’s colleagues and friends held strategic positions in banking institutions or other industries that directly impacted the economy and politics of the countries in which they were assigned to work.
So, I grew up perfectly understanding the power dynamics left by colonialism. It was even more jarring as, going back to France for the holidays, my father, who in Africa was patron (boss), was only Monsieur tout-le-monde (the average Joe) in his own country. And my father felt the difference in his bones. After almost thirty years of being called patron, he didn’t realise, but he became himself a colon (settler) through and through. I never liked going to the office with him because behaviours he would never have had in France, he would display in Cameroon, simply because his Frenchness (as in whiteness) allowed him to yield power. My dad was a far cry from that young man who, upon his arrival to Ouagadougou in 1977, experienced a cultural shock because he quickly realised that Burkinabes weren’t French like him. It was then he started challenging growing up in a racist country, but as you can see, it didn’t prevent him from losing his way.
As I was closing our interview, I asked him if raising my brother and me was difficult. This was his answer:
“I never thought it was difficult raising you, but I made a mistake, I never thought people in France could be so racist. I’ve always considered you like any other children, that is why when you got bullied at school, I suffered a lot, I could not understand why your skin colour mattered so much for others when for me you were both my children, and you just happened to look the way you looked because nature made you so.”
“I never thought people in France could be so racist”. See, despite years and years in Africa working for a colonial institution and witnessing and taking part in (I mean, let’s be honest) systemic racism in African countries, my father only really began to do active unlearning once my brother and I were in the picture. Before, he never thought France could be so racist. I let those five little words sit in because it was proof that his journey had yet to begin.
I have seen my father notice quicker than me or my mom that we were facing racism and fighting for us, but I also witnessed him perpetuating it. Each time the latter happened, I have always made myself heard. And each time, I have seen my father unsettled, hurt, trying to defend himself, and struggling with his own racism, but I have never seen him gaslight me or unwilling to listen. And I don’t take it for granted. It is a privilege for me to be able to talk freely with him about my identity and the work I do around Black identities, race and racism despite knowing it will always be a work in progress between us.
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This is simply delectable, and the following is in love: you, my Dear, are dangerous with an ink pen/keyboard! Excellent!
P.S. - that’s the thing about having children, they are humbling in ways one can’t imagine (and you Dad may never say it, but he appreciates that you’re the impetus if his continued unlearning 😉).
Je suis Caboverdienne (randomly speak French because I lived in Belgium some years) et ton essai me rapelle de mon arrière-grandmère et de sa mère, d’origine Portuguaise qui on vecu au Cabo Verde et eu des experiences pareilles. Love this essay.