It only took me a couple of seconds to decide on a title for my story. I guess this movie title is what defines me best: a white guy raised in Africa, that’s mainly what I am.
I was born in Poland, by the whims of fate, in 1973. In fact, my parents are both Polish, so I assume that was the place where a kid like me would most likely be born, however, Poland is probably the last place on Earth I would call home.
My parents and I left Poland when I was 6, mainly for political reasons. My dad, who was a civil engineer, had reached a level in his career at which it was clearly suggested to him that he should become a member of the communist party if he wanted to go any further, to which he answered that he was an atheist, so he wouldn’t go to church. Having been born in France of Polish parents, he had kept his French citizenship, which made emigration a bit easier. It still took a year and a half for the Polish authorities to let my mother and I join my father in Paris.
We arrived in Paris some time in September, and I was sent straight to French primary school. I had taken some French lessons while in Poland, the kind of lessons a 5-year-old can take. It certainly did help a little bit, however, the memories of my first days at school feel very much like being thrown into the ocean without knowing how to swim. I could just say “bonjour” and “merci”. I had no idea of what was going on. At some point, a bell rang, and I saw the other kids standing up. I took my bag with me and prepared to go, but the teacher somehow explained to me, with a great many gestures, that I had to leave my bag in the class: it was just a break. Later in the day, the exact same thing happened again. And finally, at the end of the day, the bell rang, I went out, and at that point, I saw the teacher running after me with my bag, saying something if French that probably meant: “No, this time you have to take it with you”.
It took me six months to learn French. I remember that my dad helped me a great deal. I had some notebooks at home, on which I would write the words, and my dad made some funny drawings next to them to help me remember their meaning. I would answer properly when in class, but wouldn’t speak French with other kids or adults. Then, one morning, I woke up and started speaking French, and nothing but French. When my parents spoke Polish to me, I would answer in French. This lasted for almost two years. I guess that for some time, my parents feared that I would never speak Polish again.
Finally, my mom and I went back to Poland during the summer vacation period, two years after our initial move to Paris. There, I had no choice: my family didn’t speak any French at all. It was hard, but the Polish came back after a couple of days. That was it, I was bilingual. I spoke both languages without any foreign accent. A couple of years later, I found out that adding an “extra” language to my repertoire was no difficult process. Obviously, it took some work, as it does for anybody, however, I had no difficulty mentally separating one language from the other. It was a natural process, very much like a mental switch. I just had to change the position of the switch onto the correct language, without the words and structures of the other languages interfering with whatever language I was speaking or hearing.
We spent about a year and a half in Paris. By that time, my dad had figured out that there was no way for him, with his Polish degrees and work experience, to find a proper job. So he accepted a job offer with a French firm in Algeria. We packed up, and the next thing I knew we were in Algiers, where I attended the French “Bois de Boulogne” school.
Socially speaking, things at school didn’t change much. In Paris, I had no way of communicating with other kids at the very beginning, and a couple of months later, once I had learned French, I was already used to being alone. The same thing happened in Algiers: I arrived some time in the middle of the school year, probably in January or so. Although I did speak French pretty well, I didn’t make any friends. During most of my childhood, being on recess was usually a very lonely time. I wasn’t exactly a very outgoing kid, it took me time to make friends, and once I had made some friends, we were already packing and moving to another country.
I guess that being an only child didn’t help much. No brothers or sisters to share the burden of loneliness with.
After Algeria, we moved to Yaounde, Cameroon. Then to Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. Then to Bangui, Central African Republic. Each time the project or road construction my dad was working on would end, we would move to the next country. We would go “back” to France during the summer, for a few weeks. My mom and I would go to Poland for a couple of weeks, and we would join my dad back in France, as he did not go back to Poland until the end of communism, at the beginning of the 1990’s. The first few times back to Paris, some friends of my parents put us up, then my parents purchased a small flat in Paris where we would spend a couple of weeks each summer. But each year, in September, we would fly to Africa like migratory birds for the winter.
At no point did I consider France as “home”. To me, it was just another country we had lived in for some time. Obviously, I went to French schools in all countries where we lived, but so did most of the other “non-local” kids, who were Greek, Lebanese, German, Italian, Malagasi, Pakistani, Japanese, Swiss, etc. The French embassy would be the place where we would register upon arrival – there was always a doctor on duty – but in my mind, I did not have any sense of belonging.
My parents did, though. They would make special efforts to make friends with other French expats wherever we lived, and always insisted that we should not speak Polish among us when there were French people around.
To me, French was a language, not a nationality. If asked what nationality I was at the time, I guess my answer would have been “white”, as this is what the Africans called us. I saw no major difference between the other white kids and myself. We all spoke French among us, some of them spoke French at home, others had another language that they spoke with their family, and that seemed perfectly normal to me.
After spending two years in Bangui, came a time when my dad still had a couple of months left to work on a project, but had no idea where we were going next. For some reason, my parents became concerned about me having to switch schools in the middle of the academic year, so they decided that my mom and I would spend the year in Paris, until my dad’s professional future made itself clear.
This was my first “repatriation” experience, and it was pretty harsh.
Suddenly, I found myself in a cold, unfriendly country, that I had only lived in for a couple of weeks every summer. It was raining all the time, and there was no way to predict at what time the rain would fall. In most countries in Africa, the storms would always come from the same side, and would last for 20 minutes or so. Then the sun would be back again. Everyone would stop whatever they were doing, find a shelter, and wait until the rain was over. Here, life had to continue in spite of the whether.
I had felt lonely in Africa; I soon found out that in fact, I had no idea of what loneliness was until that year in France. This was probably the first time I had to struggle with the “where are you from?” question. As you may imagine, no one was really interested to know where I was from. They only needed some indication as to what category I could fit into. Apparently, my answer was either too lengthy, or beyond anything they could imagine. Maybe they just never believed me. Anyway, while in Africa, I did not really have any friends, but here I felt like I came straight from another planet.
I was rather a good student; the trouble started when I had to interact with other kids. They used lots of slang that I didn’t understand. They often referred to TV shows or movies that I had never heard of. For a long time, we didn’t even have a TV set in Africa. When we eventually did, we mainly used it to watch movies on VHS tapes. Unfortunately, the shock was not only cultural. I did not speak like them. I did not think like them. I wore strange clothes. And I was a better student that most of them. All of this was enough for me to become a punching bag.
Oddly enough, it took me a long time to realize that I could easily fight back, as I was rather tall and strong for my age. I had simply never faced outright violent behavior from classmates. I assume expats’ kids are just over-protected. Most schools I had gone to had small numbers of students per class, and breaks were closely supervised. Never before had I seen a fight between school kids that would have gone unnoticed for more than a couple of seconds. Here, that was not the case. Several guys would lay into me, and there was no one to help or even call a supervisor. On one occasion, a classmate stuck a sharp pencil into my back during class; obviously, I was the one who ended up being punished for screaming in class for no reason. For several months, I lived in terror. Sometimes, at recess time, I would lock myself in the restroom and stay there until the bell rang. On some days, I would pretend to go to school, and go down to the basement of the building where we lived with my mom, where I would spend most of the day reading, just to avoid going to school. Gym class was yet another opportunity to be beaten up. I ended up having back problems, and got a medical leave from sport. Thinking of it 25 years later, I guess this is when I started to hate physical exercise and sports as a whole. The terror period culminated with one classmate bullying me for money to buy himself some candy at recess time.
In the last few months of the school year, I began to fight back. I was taller and stronger than most of them, and soon realized that I could easily stand up to two or three kids my age. On a few occasions, I believe I even beat up some of my aggressors badly. All of a sudden, the aggressions stopped, and I was still seen as a weirdo, but a dangerous one. This didn’t help with making friends, but I somehow ended up being friends with one guy from my class, who happened to be from the French Carribean.
The school year ended. At fall, we were back in Africa, in Burundi this time. For two years, we lived in the south of Burundi, in Makamba, a small town with a couple hundred inhabitants, and 10 white people, including myself. That’s where I started home schooling, as the closest French school was in Bujumbura, which was half a day’s car ride away. Home schooling wasn’t too hard. What was hard was not having any people of my own age around. I was surrounded by adults. I was back in Africa, which was a familiar environment, and was happy about it, but had still no friends, and not even an opportunity to have any.
These were two happy, but lonely years. I took care of the garden, learned to play the guitar, listened to all the music that the adults around me had brought with them, started to refine my musical tastes, had my parents purchase some music each time we traveled to the capital, Bujumbura, which happened almost on a weekly basis. I took guitar lessons in Bujumbura, along with the private classes that my parents had arranged for me in certain fields in which home schooling just wasn’t enough, such as math and Spanish.
It began to emerge that I was rather good at languages. I had been learning English for a couple of years, and I was pretty good at it. During the summer, my parents had sent me to London for some summer classes. I assimilated Spanish just as easily as soon as I started taking private classes. My first teacher was from Chile. Two years later, I was on a summer course in Madrid. I fell in love with that language. Three years after taking up Spanish at school, I started reading entire books in Spanish. In my last year in high school, I would spend whole nights reading books by García Marquez, Octavio Paz, or Pablo Neruda directly in Spanish.
I had a hard time with German, though. It was the last language I took up, and for some reason, I never liked it. Maybe I just never had a teacher good enough to make me like it. I also learned some Swahili, which was the vernacular language in Eastern Africa. Nowadays, I would definitely recognize it if I heard it spoken in the street, but I have forgotten almost everything I had learned.
After two years of home schooling by correspondence, again came a time when my dad was uncertain of what we would be doing next. Also, my parents seemed to have become concerned about me not having any social life or contacts with teenagers my own age. Off I went to an international boarding school in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in central France. This was my second, and very short, “repatriation” experience. This lasted for three months. I was 15. I made a couple of friends, one of which I am still in contact with. I played the guitar in a rock and pop band. I also started drinking alcohol, listening to “death metal” music and wearing T-shirts with crushed human skulls and other gruesome images. It all ended up in a fight with my roommate, with me breaking the window of our room with a chair. End of boarding school, back to Africa.
My dad eventually found another job in Burundi, this time in the capital, Bujumbura, where I attended the French school. These were probably the happiest three years of my teenage life. Buja, as it is nicknamed, was a great place. I eventually made some friends, played the guitar with other would-be musicians, went to parties, got my drivers’ licence, spent the weekends on the beach next to Lake Tanganiyika, traveled around the country, which was pretty safe at the time. I even had a girlfriend during my last year there. At last, I had something that looked close to a normal life for someone my age.
“Repatriation”, if one could be repatriated to a country where one was not born and had hardly ever lived in, eventually happened for good when I passed my “Baccalauréat” (high school graduation exam, that is) and had to move to France to go to the University. This was a very hard time. I landed in Aix-en-Provence, in southern France, which turned out to be a pretty nice place. I now believe that the setting indeed helped in softening the cultural and social shock that came with it. I remember suffering from the cold like I never did before. I made a couple of friends, most of them from other countries, who all missed their homes. I felt very much like them.
Bujumbura, where my parents still lived at the time, was probably the only place I ever called home. I developed deep nostalgia towards Buja. I visited my parents for Christmas, then again for Easter and a third time for the summer holiday. I started listening to African music, and also Zouk, which is in fact music from the French Caribbean, but also widely popular in Africa, although I had never really liked it when I lived in Africa. I had a couple of shirts sewed in typical African fabric, and wore them all the time.
During my first and only summer holiday in Bujumbura, I met a girl from Rwanda, and fell in love with her. We dated for a couple of weeks. When faced with the obligation to return to Europe, I decided to do everything I could to bring her over with me. My parents strongly opposed my decision, based on a mix of common sense and racial prejudice. Against their will, I got into debt to pay for a flight and flew back to Buja in August with the aim of marrying her. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, things didn’t go as expected, and we eventually broke up. I boarded a plane in early September, this time bound for Europe, and never heard from her again. I have never returned to Africa ever since.
As for many TCKs, restlessness had set in. In Aix, I enrolled in a course of study which consisted in spending two years abroad. I thus did my second year of university in London, and my third year in Granada, Spain. Although the group of French students I was with was rather internationally-friendly, I soon found out that I didn’t feel as homesick as they did. While living abroad, they tended to hang out with other French people, complain about the food, the different social habits of the country where we were staying. I did not feel at all like that. To me, it was just another country. Obviously, there was the language barrier, but I soon understood that hanging out with other French speakers wouldn’t help in overcoming it. This became particularly clear in Spain, where I moved in with two Spanish roommates and avoided hanging out with the rest of the group most of the time.
Granada was a great place to live. Many Spaniards somehow had no problem being both blatantly xenophobic and extremely friendly and welcoming to anyone who bothered to make an effort to adapt to their way of life. I seemed to be rather good at it, as I made many Spanish friends who said publicly that after all, I was almost half-Spanish. I assume this was the greatest compliment they could have made to a foreigner.
I would have loved to stay in Spain, but had to move on. The following year, I was back in Aix-en-Provence for my last year at University.
I eventually moved to Paris, where my parents were at the time. My dad would later leave for another job to Cameroon, and then to Poland for a highway construction for a couple of years, before retiring.
My plans were to prepare for one of the public competitive exams to become a civil servant with the ministry of foreign affairs, or to work for some international organization. None of this happened. I also tried to become an interpreter, and joined the prestigious ESIT, a public translators and interpreters school in Paris. I got kicked out after the first year along with 75% of the other first-year students, and was told that I didn’t have what it took. I also worked part-time at Disneyland as an attraction host. I got a job as a legal assistant in a US law firm, but got sacked after 6 months due to a senior lawyer being unhappy with me having chosen DHL instead of FedEx for an urgent document. I even moved to London, at one point, and worked with a financial printer in the City. This didn’t work out either. I didn’t seem to fit anywhere.
Eventually, I found a job with a British law firm in Paris, where I stayed for seven years. Having started as an entry-level legal assistant, some people soon noticed that I could translate pretty well. This is how I became a legal translator. I had no in-depth legal training, but I learned as I translated. I continue learning even today. Every new document can be a challenge. I switched jobs and joined a US law firm a couple of years ago, still in Paris.
One may think that having a stable job, with little opportunity to move geographically would help me settle down. One would be wrong: the restlessness transferred itself to other fields. I got involved in salsa music and dancing, was part of a dance company, traveled to New York, Puerto Rico, and many other places to perform and attend dance workshops. I then became a Latin music DJ. Again, this was an opportunity to travel around and party all night. I would come home from work, sleep for a couple of hours, wake up at 10pm, go out dancing, have a snack somewhere at 2am, go home and sleep again for a couple of hours before heading back to work. This way of life eventually ended once I became too old to physically put up with it, and I eventually took my “day job” seriously. But I had to continue moving around.
A few years ago, I discovered scuba diving. This became yet another reason to jump onto a plane whenever I had some vacation. I went diving to the Caribbean, Mexico, French Polynesia, the Maldives, the Philippines, the Red Sea… Now I’m totally broke and spending the summer in Paris working to get out of debt. 
)
Restlessness also impacted my personal life. Although I had several long-term relationships, “long-term” to me seems to mean an average of three years. Haven’t found a partner in life who could make me want to stay longer.
If you’ve reached this line in my story, and are still reading, you must be either bored to death, or you can relate to this story. That is, at least, what happened to me when I discovered this site, and the very concept of a TCK (or CCK, I believe I would better fit). All of a sudden, I was no longer alone, there were other people like me out there.
Looks like I’ve finally found a home, albeit virtual.
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