“Schwaarze Mann”, the story of Luxembourg’s first black citizen

RFI: You are a musician, director and, in your own words, “ comedian at times “. What touched you so much in the story of Jacques Leurs to the point of making a film of it? ?

Franz Hausemer : The story itself and its uniqueness. The fact of arriving as the first person of black skin in a country completely composed of white inhabitants, a country a little closed in on itself, very provincial. Jacques Leurs landed there as a little boy like a UFO, at an age when you absorb the culture around you. It touched me, the fact of being the Other. For me, it’s not necessarily a story about racism, but about being different. It’s something we can all feel at some point, it’s pretty universal.

Jacques Their will be the first black citizen of Luxembourg. How is it possible that it was you who made the first film about him, fifty years after his death in 1968 and more than a century after his arrival in the Grand Duchy? ?

Myself, I asked myself the question when I started in 2011 to work on this subject? I said to myself, there must have been historians, this story has certainly been noted somewhere… but no, Jacques Leurs has completely slipped through the cracks. This is all the more surprising, because he was a trade unionist, very active in politics. He was very well known, very appreciated, because he managed to speak to the two political sides of the time: the left and the right which did not speak to each other. So, apparently we touched on a colonial past which did indeed exist, despite the fact that Luxembourg had no colonies. It was through a meeting with his widow, Léonie Leurs, that I came across this story.

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Jacques Leurs was born to a Luxembourgish father, an employee of a colonial company, and a Congolese mother, who was part of an oppressed people. Him, who hardly knew his parents, how did he experience this double belonging ?

This is the question I ask myself in the film. Especially since he ignored his African family history for much of his life. It was not until he turned 30 that tongues started to loosen up, that he began to understand why his father took him to Luxembourg and why he abandoned him. And to know what happened to the rest of his family. At that time, he learns that he has a sister in the Belgian Congo. He gently tries to reconnect with this African history of his family. But it was quite painful for him to find out so late.

In the film, I ask the question: how to grow wings without knowing your roots? Jacques Leurs was always between the two continents, between Africa and Europe. And at one point, through his trade union action, he tried to step over the great ocean, this huge gap between these two worlds.

How did you film the Congo and Jacques Leurs’ links with the Congo ?

I asked myself this question quite early in the writing of the film. Are we going there? Are we going to Congo, to film it today? But to find what? With a lot of luck, maybe we would have found the colonial house of his father where he worked at the time for the Lomami Company which produced rubber. Then, I said to myself that it was a huge effort to make to finally perhaps find only traces. I had the impression of being much closer to these traces through these testimonies, the letters that he himself wrote when he went to Africa later and also through the letters of his father, wonderful letters that came as a gift from heaven. Letters dating from 1905 and 1906 where his father recounts his daily life in the Congo, among the natives.

I wanted to treat the Congo as Jacques would have imagined it as a child. Because Jacques had forgotten this Congo. He came to Luxembourg when he was 2 years old. He grew up there. I imagine that Congo has become a kind of fantasy in his head. For this we used a lot of animation, drawing, all these graphic supports, to build an unrealistic Congo, but as it could have been born in the head of a boy of 5, 6, 7 or 10 years old, completely cut off of that world. I found that much more interesting than going there and filming an abandoned hut.

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In Luxembourg, Jacques Leur grew up among the Luxembourg natives. How did he experience his childhood and youth ?

It’s very ambiguous. Jacques was accepted at the same time, we call him “Our Jacques”, among the railway workers, he was one of them. At the same time, there was also a rejection, because he was different. He could excel at school, was very appreciated, very well cared for, but behind there was an idea of ​​saying to himself: I have to be better than the others, otherwise people will always point fingers at me, treat me of all kinds of names. So it was ambiguous.

Part of his family, on his father’s side, completely rejected him. An uncle didn’t speak to her for years when they worked together at the same station. It’s crazy. There were a lot of things left unsaid in the family. I think it’s typical for that time when people didn’t talk about their emotions, their fears. And there was also this: what will people say? It was something quite oppressive. He suffered from it. I know a few anecdotes that aren’t in the film where they call it “dirty black” and reject it. At the same time, he had friends everywhere and people who really supported him.

Jacques Theirs was a railwayman, a trade unionist, a politician… He succeeded in life and succeeded in his life, but he didn’t want to have a child to prevent him from going through what he went through. Did he have the feeling of having remained on a failure ?

Yes, there was this failure in his life. The fact of refusing to have a child with the woman he loved and by whom he was loved. Léonie would have liked to have a child. She was not ashamed of the idea of ​​having a half-breed child of a half-breed. He didn’t feel capable. We must not forget that he had just spent the period of occupation by the Nazis in 1940 where he was persecuted. They had threatened to emasculate him, to take away his manhood so that he wouldn’t have a child. At the time, the Nazis said: you must not have children of “5th” and “6th” class men and women. It left deep scars.

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Is the courage of his wife, Léonie Leurs, recognized today in Luxembourg society? ?

Today, she is recognized, also thanks to this film that I was able to make together with her. Without his testimony, this film would not have seen the light of day. Lots of people knew her, because she was a wonderful woman, with great energy, very involved in lots of things. And of course, we knew her husband, but as a trade unionist, politician, sportsman, president of the Olympic committee of Luxembourg… but the more intimate, more private, unfortunate story too, many people learned about it by Schwaarze Mann. Thanks to the film, we really measured what they experienced together. Then came some recognition. Fortunately. Léonie Leurs was so proud to have her story brought to the screen. And I’m extremely happy that she got to see the movie before she passed away, at the age of 102, two years ago. But she saw the movie. For her, it was like a confession. She said : ” I haven’t talked about that for 50 years. But I know I’ve come to the end of my life and I need to talk about it. Of all that is bad too, of all that hurt me, but also of all the beautiful things. »

Since the release of Schwaarze Mann – Black Among Us, what are the reactions to the film ?

After cinemas, we were also able to show it elsewhere. There were many requests from schools, cultural centers… Very often, I was invited to come and discuss with the public, discussions lasting an hour, an hour and a half. People stayed in theaters. The same for young people in schools, they asked a lot of questions. Now, we are in classes with a social mix and we find a little of all origins. As in France too, there are children of all origins, they are not all of the same skin color. And they know these problems today. With this film, suddenly they realize that this story already existed almost a century ago.

► To go further in the history of Schwaarze Mann – a Black Among Us, by Fränz Hausemer => Pedagogical file around Jacques Leurs