Byre World February 2025

On 12 February 2025, an oversubscribed event at the Byre Theatre in St Andrews brought together François d’Adesky, Nicki Hitchcott, and John D McInally for a public conversation. The exchange centred on François d’Adesky’s personal story of being forcibly separated from his Rwandan mother in 1953 and their reunion in 1979. In the final discussion, shaped by questions from the audience, attention turned to the mothers of the Belgian empire’s stolen children and to the longer legacies of colonial violence shaping family histories and collective memory.