Metissen sues Belgian state for kidnapping

For the first time, the Belgian government risks being sentenced to reparations for crimes against humanity committed in the Congolese colony. "Apologies aren't enough."

Simone Ngalula (71), Léa Tavares Mujinga (78), Monique Bitu Bingi (72), Noëlle Verbeken (76) and Marie-José Loshi (74) stayed as metis children – children of Congolese mothers and Belgian fathers – together at the mission post of Katende, in Congo. Sixty years later, they are suing the Belgian state for kidnapping, assault, being separated from their families and taking away their identities. All on a racial basis, because of their skin color. The case will come before the Brussels civil court on Thursday.

"We don't want to have the entire colonization condemned," says Brussels lawyer Michèle Hirsch. "We ask that the Belgian government be ordered to repair the damage it has done to these women."

Children of sin

The so-called mulatto question troubled the colonial government from the beginning. Mixing between the varieties had to be avoided at all costs. God created the white and the black man, the devil made the 'mulatto', also called 'child of sin'. If they were born anyway, they had to be checked. By the middle of the twentieth century, missions were deployed all over Congo to help solve the 'problem'. The same happened in the mandated territories of Rwanda and Burundi.

“It was a systematic policy of segregation and not a coincidence, as the Belgian state has already argued.”

Michele Hirsch

lawyer

Well documented is the fate of some 300 metis children who were evacuated to our country from the Save orphanage in Rwanda in the late 1950s, and almost all of them were adopted here.

No one knows how many metis children were born in total in colonial times. Historical counts vary widely. The five women who are now filing a case were not evacuated to Belgium when Congo became independent. When the sisters left, they were left alone. "The new regime sent soldiers to 'protect' us," says Monique Bitu Bingi. “Every night we were the subject of their sexual games. I was ten or eleven.”

Simone Ngalula also stayed behind. "We were children of Father Staat and Queen Fabiola was our godmother. But Father has forsaken us. When we needed it most, when it really came down to it, it left us suffocating.”

Later, like many other fellow sufferers, she had the greatest difficulty in becoming Belgian. “My husband and daughter were Belgian. Not me. I couldn't get my head around that.”

Another time

The lawyers argue that this was a systematic policy of segregation, and not a coincidence, as the Belgian state has already argued. It also points out that it was a different time, in which different mores and customs applied, and that other European countries did the same.

Hirsch subtly notes that the opposing party's plea is not in line with the content of the text with which Prime Minister Charles Michel apologized in parliament in 2019: "He has said that the fundamental rights of the metis of Belgium have been violated. Apologies alone are not enough.”

"The Belgian state should better take an example of what those other countries have already done to correct their mistakes," says lawyer Olivier Marchand. He refers to Canada and Australia, which have taken remedial measures for Indigenous children, and to the Netherlands and France, which did the same for crimes during their colonial rule.

The lawyers demand a provisional compensation of 50,000 euros for each of the five women, and the appointment of an expert to determine the real moral damage.

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