To Be Worthy of the Name of My Father: Métis, Paternity and Belonging in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Colonial and Postcolonial French Africa and France

Abstract

This article explores the little-known story of the métis children of a well-known figure in French history – Dr Eugène Jamot, who was a medical doctor who had served in the colonial service in French West Africa (AOF) and French Equatorial Africa (AEF) in the early-twentieth century. Jamot fathered three multiracial children with an African Fulani woman named Fatima Labané who originated from AEF. In patriating them to France, Jamot established a de facto acknowledgement of paternity and fostered domestic life with/for and paternal care for his children. His death in April 1937 left his three children in a state of legal, social and economic vulnerability. Over the course of several years, his oldest son Louis Desnaute, Jamot's White French male friends and professional colleagues and Labané endeavoured to form a safety net, care consisting of money, the mobilisation of citizenship law and the exercise of social resources of citizenship rights for the children to secure and affirm their belonging in/to France. This article argues that an infrastructure of feelings – paternalism, maternalism, loyalty, vulnerability, pathos, affection, shame, anger, despair and anxiety – facilitated relational rupture and repair for the three children and their children from the colonial to postcolonial periods.