BACKGROUND 

Where we come from, there is no shame, It is what it is, just part of the game. Now we move forward, it's time for a change, The future is bright, no longer so strange. I am who I am, shaped by my past, hardened in Flanders, but Brussels held fast. Through trials I blossomed, now ready to grow, With roots in the past, but new seeds to sow.

Jean Kiala-Inkisi was born on May 10, 1985, in Arlon, Belgium, where his father was stationed in the Belgian army. His birth name was Jan-Frederik Goyvaerts. Although born in the French-speaking area of Belgium, he is Flemish. He is of Kongo and West Flemish descent on the side of his mother, Sandra Kiala, who is of mixed race. On his father's side, Johan Goyvaerts, he is of East Flemish and Kempen descent. Jean's father, Major J. Goyvaerts, was a former member of the Special Forces (para commando) and one of the most decorated elite soldiers in the Belgian army. His grandfather, Major A. Goyvaerts, and great-grandfather, Adjutant Georges Leyn, also served in the Belgian army. He is the great-grandchild of Renée Kempen, a Flemish painter.

As a child, he first grew up in Schriek, a sub-municipality of Heist-op-den-Berg in the province of Antwerp, Belgium. After completing pre-kindergarten, he moved with his family to Gisenyi, Rwanda, in 1991, where his father worked as a blue-helmet UN soldier and for the Belgian Technical Military Cooperation (CTM). When the genocide started, they fled back to Schriek in Belgium. He was tested for his Dutch language skills at the psycho-medical-social center (PMS) in Heist-op-den-Berg. There, his Dutch-speaking parents were told that it was best for him to repeat the first grade. He attended school in Schriek until the second grade.

In 1993, his father was seriously injured during a UNITAF mission in Afmadow, Somalia, where he was ambushed and shot in the head. After four years of recovery, his father wrote his memoirs in a book titled KILO TWO, named after the detachment he commanded. Before the accident, Jean and his father had a close bond, but it deteriorated afterward. In 1994, he moved to Cologne, Germany, where his father worked for the Belgian Armed Forces in Germany (BSD). Jean attended the third and fourth years of school in the Flemish section of the Belgian school in Weiden. After the restructuring of the Belgian army, the BSD contingent was gradually reduced, and they returned to Belgium in 1995. His parents built a house in Betekom, a sub-municipality of Begijnendijk in the province of Flemish Brabant, where Jean completed the fifth and sixth grades at the municipal boys' primary school.

In 1998, he began secondary education in Modern Sciences with a focus on sports at the Royal Athenaeum of Keerbergen. He had a troubled childhood. His father often served abroad on training and missions, while his mother, a housewife, stayed behind with four children and worked occasionally. His authoritative father contrasted sharply with his more lenient mother, and whenever his father returned home after long absences, tensions would rise within the family. Jean struggled to adapt to his father's discipline and expectations, which, combined with school pressures, made him a mediocre student who grew tired of school from an early age. At age 14, his mother placed him in an open youth facility because she could no longer cope. It was there that he was nicknamed "Jean Kiala" by another Congolese quarter-blood. Six months later, his father took him out of the facility when he returned from a mission. The open youth institution, along with the Center for Pupil Guidance (CLB), advised his mother to send him to a lower academic track. In 1999, he transferred to the Provincial Horticultural School of Leuven, where he pursued professional education in horticulture, obtaining his diploma in 2005 after completing a seventh specialization year in Agricultural Horticulture. Jean never forgave his mother for this decision and, in protest, skipped both his sixth and seventh-grade graduation ceremonies, choosing instead to drink beer at a café in Leuven's old market. He collected his diplomas at a later date.

From adolescence, Jean began searching for his identity. While his younger siblings attended school in the neighboring town of Aarschot and played with their classmates, Jean never hung out with his white peers. He was a loner at school and frequently faced racism. He gravitated toward people of color, adopted children, and immigrant youth. After school, he spent time among the African diaspora in Leuven and often slipped away to Brussels on Wednesday afternoons and Saturdays. This frustrated his father, as Jean was frequently late for family dinners. Among his African friends, he was known as Jean Kiala. Much to his parents' dismay, he never brought friends home. Jean recalls one instance when two adopted Haitian schoolmates visited his home, and his father was shocked to see two black boys in bandanas and baggy pants. After they left, his father gave a diatribe about how he had raised Jean to be "white" and insisted that he should have both white and colored friends.

Through his association with the Congolese diaspora, Jean encountered tribalism for the first time. Although aware of his Congolese/Zairean roots, he did not know which ethnic group his ancestors belonged to or from which region they originated. His maternal grandmother had always kept the family history a secret and even lied about it. Jean's maternal grandfather, Lieutenant Omer Damas Kiala, was an officer in the Congolese Navy during the 1960s. He met Jean's grandmother, Christiane Caenen, from Brugge, when a Congolese naval ship docked several times in Zeebrugge in the early years of Mobutu's regime. They married and moved to Léopoldville in the Congo, where she worked as a civilian for the Belgian military police. Lieutenant Kiala died in Kinshasa in the early 1970s after contracting yellow fever in the eastern Congolese port city of Kalemie. After his death, Jean's grandmother fled back to Belgium, where she continued her career with the Rijkswacht and later the Federal Police. Jean's mother and her siblings grew up believing their father had been murdered by Mobutu's regime, a lie told by their mother.

During Jean's high school years, his relationship with his father soured further, even leading to physical altercations. His father threatened to throw him out at age 17. At that time, Jean was in his fifth year of high school and had two more years to go until graduation. During his senior year, he occasionally worked in gardening. One day, the mother of one of Jean's younger brother's classmates came to their house, knowing Jean was set to graduate, and asked if he could tend their garden. Jean accepted the job. After receiving his diploma on June 24, 2005, he was offered a full-time job by the same family to work on their private estate in Lubbeek. Jean informed his mother that he was moving out. She bought him basic household items and furniture behind his father's back, and Jean moved into the caretaker's house on the estate. His parents were on vacation abroad at the time, and upon their return, they were shocked to discover that Jean had already moved out. When he returned home to collect his remaining belongings, his father requested a final conversation. His siblings were asked to leave the house so his parents could speak with him. During the conversation, Jean's father revealed, with his mother present, that he did not love her and that they had only married because Jean's mother was pregnant with him. Jean's father claimed that Jean was unwanted and that his maternal grandmother had threatened to ruin his military reputation if they didn't marry. His father also said he planned to divorce Jean's mother once their youngest son left home. After this conversation, Jean cut off contact with his father for good and never saw him again. Jean's youngest brother moved into a student flat, and his sister, the youngest sibling, went to live with their mother. Jean's parents divorced in 2014.

In the spring of 2007, Jean moved to the Brussels-Capital Region, where he worked various jobs at the national airport and in the capital. During the European debt crisis, Jean began to believe that Europe's future was bleak. He lived in various Brussels municipalities such as Etterbeek, Ixelles, the City of Brussels, Laeken, Sint-Joost-ten-Noode, and Uccle while working on projects in Africa. In 2010, Jean began asking his grandmother about the history of his Congolese grandfather. When he was young, he often visited his grandmother and played in the attic. He had always been warned to avoid a certain corner in the attic, but one day, while she was in the hospital, he defied her warnings and found a leather suitcase full of photographs of his grandfather and correspondence between Belgium and Congo from the 1980s and 1990s. When his grandmother discovered that photos were missing, she no longer wanted to see him, and Jean hasn't seen her since 2010. In 2014, Jean learned he had a Congolese family when his grandfather's youngest brother added him on Facebook and sent personal family photos. Through their conversations, Jean learned that his grandmother had been secretly writing letters from her office at the Federal Police at the national airport in Zaventem. The letters revealed a different family history than what Jean had been told. According to his family in Congo, his grandmother had initially wanted to stay in Congo and marry her late husband's younger brother, but the family disapproved, prompting her to return to Belgium. Jean's grandfather belonged to the BaKongo ethnic group and came from a line of traditional chiefs in the city of Ngidinga in southwestern Congo. According to tradition, the firstborn son would continue the family line, but since Jean's grandfather had died, that responsibility passed to Jean's uncle. Jean's grandmother had fled to Belgium to prevent losing her son and cut off all contact with the family. The family had even traveled to Belgium in the late 1970s and early 1980s to try to reconnect, but without success. Since Jean's grandfather's siblings were elderly, his great-uncle had taken on the mission to find his late brother's descendants. Of all the grandchildren of Omer Damas Kiala, only Jean had shown any interest in Africa. Jean eventually changed his name to Jean Kiala-Inkisi under Belgian law, choosing to distance himself from his family. He took "Jean Kiala" as his first name, after his old nickname, and "Inkisi" as a tribute to his ancestors' homeland in the Inkisi River region.