My dad only wanted to help kids in Rwanda, but when I met the people he had helped, I understood the impact of white saviourism
12 years after my dad's death, I returned to Rwanda to meet the boy he had sponsored and see the impact of his actions.
My dad, a secondary school teacher in England, spent a few years managing a fundraising and sponsorship scheme in Gisenyi, Rwanda (Picture: Mike Ullmann)
It’s been 14 years since I last saw Charles in person.
We are having lunch in a busy cafe on a hot March day in Kigali, Rwanda. With a decade to catch up on, even though we aren’t related by blood, we still refer to each other as brothers, my family as his family.
Then Charles' voice saddens - which it often does when he talks about my dad in the past tense. He asks me: “Daddy called me his ‘third child’ in our emails. Do you think that will help with the visa application process if I want to come work in England?”
There's a silence as I understand, for perhaps the first time, the reality of my dad’s complicated legacy. The reality of the impact caused by his sponsorship of Charles 15 years ago.
I knew as we sat there, that I hadn't prepared myself well enough. I hadn’t let myself consider how far that impact could have gone, and that I didn’t have the right answer to give.
When discussing my dad’s white saviour complex with people, many often get defensive for me, as if acknowledging his well-intentioned but problematic attitudes hurts me and I need their support and reassurance.
Other times, it feels like a type of white guilt, keen to defend someone they can relate to with a ‘back then how could he have known?’
My dad - a secondary school teacher who grew up in Leeds and brought up a devout Christian - was a product of his society and his religion. He was also a kind man, who cared about fighting injustice. All those things led him to set up partnerships between his school and schools in Romania, India and Rwanda, running fundraising campaigns to support them for many years.
The Rwanda partnership was closest to his heart, as he had initially tried to move to Cameroon in the 1960s for missionary work but was refused on health grounds. In Rwanda, he set up a sponsorship programme for people from our school in England to fund the tuition of students in Gisenyi, a city in the northwest of Rwanda.
These fundraising and child sponsorship schemes that support children in Africa are still common today, and though they are well-intentioned, many who take part in them are rarely aware of what damage they can potentially cause. How they reinforce ideas of racial roles - whiteness understood as wealth, knowledge and a reliable source of support, whereas blackness is seen as the opposite, of poverty and ignorance.
I, like many from our school who took part in this partnership, and like my dad, thought the partnership was doing some good. Today looking back, I now understand how our actions helped to reinforce those roles.
Charles and I, meeting for the first time in 2008 (Picture: Jeremy Ullmann)
My dad died from cancer in May 2010, a few months after his last trip to Rwanda. Before he passed away, he asked our family to continue funding the university fees for Charles, who he had been sponsoring and was in regular contact with for many years.
I was 18, and despite once meeting Charles during a school trip, our relationship mostly consisted of a few letter exchanges, encouraged by my dad.
We paid the fees until Charles graduated, but then, as the years passed and we processed our grief, my dad’s work in Rwanda became a distant footnote in our memory of him, just another chapter. Our communication with Charles dwindled until our Facebook Messenger chat became a long list of unanswered questions, while his profile picture remained, for a decade after we had met, a photo of him and me.
Last year, after receiving a wedding invite from another student from the Gisenyi sponsorship programme, I decided that I should visit. I had processed my dad’s death, but had begun to ask myself questions about the Rwanda chapter in his life and felt a responsibility to see what the impact of it was.
It had been well over a year since I'd last responded to Charles, so it was with some shame that I contacted him to see if we could meet up during my visit. I reached out to the former school in Gisenyi too, and, with a mix of curiosity and trepidation, booked a flight.
I met Charles on my second day in Kigali. His parents had been killed during the Rwandan Genocide when he was six, and he'd spent most of his childhood being moved from foster home to foster home, to relatives who didn’t want to support him and his siblings.
My dad on his last trip to Gisenyi in 2009, a few months before he died (Picture: Mike Ullmann)
He said the first time he had a sense of family was when my dad began writing him emails and supporting his studies. Those emails, which he showed me after I asked to see, were often signed off ton Papa Anglais (your English daddy) and were filled with religious affection.
In Charles’ house, there are no photos of his parents because he has none. Instead, he has photos of us, my dad, my mum, my sister and me. He said: “I felt lonely for so many years without a family. Then with Daddy I didn’t feel loneliness anymore.”
After my dad died, Charles shut himself out of school for a week. He had lost both parents he said, then gained one, then lost him again.
In Gisenyi, as I was proudly shown around the school by a former teacher and close friend of my dad’s, teachers and staff approached me and spoke of him in glowing terms. I was used to this after his death from people in the UK, but here was an added layer, something which reflected how his role in this place had been unusual and unexpected.
There was gratitude as I was shown books sent by my school, from the coach who praised the courts that we had fundraised to build. They spoke of the sadness they felt after his death, how they had lost a dear friend. I felt his memory being carried along through the people, the buildings and books, and that he was more alive there than he had felt to me for 12 years.
A view of the Gisenyi school (Picture: Jeremy Ullmann)
I also felt uneasy, because it seemed that within the gratitude lay some resentment. Frustrations about how the programme my dad set up, with its funding which had been central to their development - suddenly stopped after his death. 'One day people just stopped answering emails,' I was told.
Projects were left unfinished, others over the years fell into unmaintained disrepair. Some students’ sponsorships continued while others faded away. Classrooms shared by those whose lives would be forever altered by English money, and others forced to process the loss of expectation. The details and dynamics of human lives that sponsors rarely consider. Africa as a project, not a people.
The impact that the partnership had on the Gisenyi school was transformative, often good, but problematic because it was short-term, unsustainable and reinforced ideas that white Europeans could come in and solve many issues.
During the one time our school funded a group of the Gisenyi students to visit England, six ran away before boarding the flight home making national news.
15 years later, in a muted tone filled with disappointment for the community, a couple of Gisenyi’s staff recollected the incident to me.
There is still a hurt and sadness in Gisenyi about a partnership that ended so abruptly. Whereas in the collective memory of our English school, it was all too easy to move on.
A poster made by students in 2008 to celebrate the Gisenyi - England school partnership (Picture: Ben Ellen)
My dad had so much compassion. He cared and wanted to help, and through a very simplistic and convenient lens, he did. Students got access to university and many school buildings and facilities were repaired or rebuilt. He ensured that the visiting English students were educated about Rwandan culture (something which, to his credit, was uncommon in the voluntourism of the 2000s), and he was committed to supporting Charles indefinitely. People are grateful, they've told me just how grateful.
But he also forced change without a clear understanding of its long-term impact. My dad's influence changed the trajectory of people’s lives, normalising a belief that we knew what was best for them. His ambitions were heavily influenced by his religion, and just as he ended his childhood wanting to be a missionary on the continent, it was well known that when he planned to retire he would move to Rwanda and live out his life there.
He extended our family to Charles, which promised affection we would always struggle to maintain without him. He made money central to that relationship and passed that responsibility onto me. And I failed, perhaps right until we met in Kigali 15 years after my family came into his life, to see the relationship as anything more than a transaction.
As I sat down on the beach of Lake Kivu (which connects Gisenyi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo) exactly where I stood with my dad 14 years before, I opened the pot which contained his last remaining ashes that I had, and emptied it over the sand.
I thought about how much he had loved this country, about his wish to retire here, and as I watched the grey and yellow start to blend together in the wind, I thought, yes, this is what he would’ve wanted. To be at one with Rwanda.
I wish he had felt differently. I wish he had lived longer to have realised how problematic that love was, the hurt that was caused by his actions. I wish for him that he could’ve had the opportunity to be educated, to find a healthier way to help.
Rubavu Public Beach, Lake Kivu, Rwanda (Picture: Jeremy Ullmann)
But in the end, some people will always have that automatic urge to justify his actions, to talk about that time and place, about good intentions. I feel it too, the need to justify my own actions of letting my relationship with Charles fade for a decade, the need to not pass too harsh a judgement on someone who isn’t here to defend themselves, who could’ve changed if he was still alive.
The present doesn’t pause to contextualise those who are stuck in the past forever, but the impact of their actions and ours today are real and they are happening now. Acknowledging that uncomfortable truth and learning from it is crucial if we are to help ourselves become better anti-racists.
I have decided to respect the relationship with Charles, not by continuing my dad’s legacy, but committing to communicate, to love and respect a connection with a brother 4,000 miles away. I am not sure if this is entirely unproblematic, but it feels necessary and I am glad to do it. We both lost someone we saw as a father after all, and, though neither of us had a choice in the matter, we share this.
My dad was a caring man who wanted to help people. I loved him. He was also influenced by religiously motivated white saviourism. His actions both positively and negatively impacted individuals. Two things can be true, and it’s possible that a simple and entirely right answer might not exist.
And while his ashes are scattered around the world now, most of him will always reside in Rwanda, where his presence will be felt for a long time to come for better or for worse, by those who knew him, and many who never will.