Five women who were kidnapped as children
The five women—Marie-Jose Loshi, Monique Bitu Bingi, Lea Tavares Mujinga, Simone Ngalula and Noëlle Verbeken—took legal action against the Belgian state for the suffering they endured as children. AP Photo / Francisco Seco
When Congo was under Belgian colonial rule between 1908 and 1960, thousands of mixed-race children were abducted from their Black mothers and raised as orphans in Catholic institutions and homes. Five of these victims—a group of women now in their 70s and 80s—have been fighting for Belgium’s government to acknowledge the suffering they endured as young children.
Last week, a Brussels appeals court ruled that the Belgian state had committed a crime against humanity. The state must now pay each woman €50,000 (about $52,000) “for the moral damage resulting from the loss of their connection to their mother and the damage to their identity and their connection to their original environment,” said the judges.
“At last, we’ve been heard, and the courts have ruled in our favor,” plaintiff Lea Tavares Mujinga tells Agence France-Presse. “It’s a very large part of our lives that was taken away from us, that the Belgian state had broken. We’ll never be able to get it back. But at least it’s a gesture of some relief.”
For many decades, Belgium ruled what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Rwanda. Interracial relations were condemned, and children of Black mothers and white fathers weren’t recognized by the government—unless they were accepted by their white parent. Otherwise, many of these children, known as métis, became wards of the state.
Tavares Mujinga was 2 years old when Belgian authorities took her from her mother and brought her to a mission in Katende around 1946. The all-girls orphanage was run by nuns, who told their charges they were “children of sin,” per the Guardian’s Jennifer Rankin. The children’s parentage was selectively obfuscated.
“I grew up thinking my father was dead,” Simone Ngalula, who was brought to Katende in 1952, told Smithsonian magazine’s Jocelyn C. Zuckerman last year. “They told us that our father was the state, Papa l’État.”
Simone Ngalula and Lea Tavares Mujinga
Simone Ngalula and Lea Tavares Mujinga in 2020 John Thys / AFP via Getty Images
The children of Katende were underfed and abused. As Tavares Mujinga told Smithsonian magazine, her legs are scarred from ulcers she developed at Katende due to malnutrition. On her forehead is a square-shaped indentation from “a particularly forceful smack from a nun she received when she was 5.”
When Belgian Congo gained independence in 1960, the girls of Katende were abandoned, and during the ensuing unrest, many of them were sexually assaulted. Years later, four of the plaintiffs became Belgian citizens, and the fifth, Marie-José Loshi, became a citizen of France. In 2018, the five women gathered for a barbeque at Monique Bitu Bingi’s house, where they told their story to their children and decided to take legal action, reports the New York Times’ Jenny Gross and Elian Peltier.
In 2019, Belgium’s government apologized for the country’s role in the Congo kidnappings, and Belgium’s King Philippe affirmed his “deepest regrets for these past wounds” in Congo the following year.
In 2021, the five women argued their case in a lower court and lost. They decided to appeal—and now, three years later, they’ve won.
“This is a victory and a historic judgment,” says Michèle Hirsch, one of the women’s lawyers, per the Guardian. “It is the first time in Belgium and probably in Europe that a court has condemned the Belgian colonial state for crimes against humanity.”
Bitu Bingi’s daughter, Monique Fernandes, tells the Associated Press’ Raf Casert that the verdict has given her mother a sense of closure.
“I feel so relieved,” Bitu Bingi tells the Times. “The Belgian government took my youth away, and it was something I had to fight for, to explain to the world what happened.”
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Filed Under: Africa, African History, children , Colonialism, Congo, Crime, European History, History, Law, Racism