The decision handed down in December 2024 caused quite a stir, as it was the first time that a state had been found guilty of crimes against humanity during its colonial period. This legal victory for five women born to Belgian fathers and Congolese mothers whom Belgium took from their families, paves the way for others. Between 1948 and 1951, nearly 15,000 Belgian mixed-race children were abducted, declared to have no known father, and placed in religious missions several hundred kilometres from their home villages. Mixed marriages were considered a “sin” at the time.
The Belgian state appealed to the Court of Cassation following the ruling of the Brussels Court of Appeal, which ordered it to pay €50,000 – plus interest at a legal rate dating back to when they were abducted – to the five plaintiffs: Monique Bitu Bingi, Noëlle Verbeken, Simone Ngalula, Marie-José Loshi, and Léa Tavares Mujinga. The women did not wish to disclose the final amounts that they have received. The Court of Cassation has not yet ruled on the case, and if it overturns the judgment, the plaintiffs may be required to repay the money while awaiting a new trial.
“A price cannot be put on a life”
“A price cannot be put on a life, but there must be some reparation,” says Léa, now 79 years old. Léa married a Belgian man. She now lives north of Brussels, where she spoke to Justice Info along with Simone, whom she met in the same religious congregation 60 years ago and calls her “little sister”. The two women, born to a Congolese mother and a Belgian father, agreed to look back on their lives.
“I was two years old when I was taken from my parents in 1948,” says Léa. “The state had already taken my brother a year earlier, but I was still too young then. I was not yet weaned and still wore diapers. They waited until my father was on vacation and then sent in the military. If my mother had refused, they would have sent her to prison.”
Léa was placed in the religious mission of Katende in the central-western Kasai region of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was hundreds of miles from her village.
“I was completely disoriented. I didn’t understand the language, their food was strange and there was no more milk, I was weaned immediately. They took away my little dress, my shoes, my socks, and left me barefoot. I slept on a small wooden bed without sheets or a pillow, just a blanket like the ones they gave to prisoners in the camps or the ones you put in the trunk of a car. We washed in the river, there were no towels to dry ourselves with in the morning, no toothbrushes, no toilet paper. The conditions were inhumane. If you refused to eat, it was your problem, not the nuns’.”
Abandonment after abandonment
Above all was the feeling of abandonment. “At that age, we still wanted the smell of our mothers,” Léa continues. “My father came back from Portugal to find me but when he arrived his child was gone, and he divorced my mother. She came to see me once or twice at the mission, but then she fell very ill.”
Léa remained until she was 14 in this religious mission, where abuse and food deprivation could be a daily occurrence. She was then sent to Mikalayi, southwest of Kananga, to continue her education. Léa was abandoned once again in 1960, when Congo became independent, by the same sisters who had taken her away 12 years earlier.
“I had just obtained a teaching qualification and was waiting for the sisters to come and get me, but no one came. All the other children had left and I couldn’t stay there,” says the 70-year-old. On the eve of independence, tensions rose in the Kasai region and the congregation was evacuated. The nuns managed to flee in UN trucks, leaving behind some 50 mixed-race girls.
They were placed in a dispensary, “right next to the morgue”, Simone recalls, supervised by militiamen who abused them after dark.
The “children of sin”
Léa did not know what to do. “I couldn’t stay in Mikalayi anymore, but I didn’t know what transport to take, so I followed a girl to her village with my little cardboard suitcase.”
When she arrived in the village, she was introduced to a member of her mother’s ethnic group. Luckily, he turned out to be her grandfather, and his family arranged for her to return to her native village. Her mother was very ill and died a few years later. Her father was living in Portugal at the time, and “as soon as he heard I was coming back to the village, he asked me to join him. I wanted to work in Congo, so I refused,” Léa recalls.
“We were called children of sin,” says Simone. “I didn’t even know I had brothers. I only know my story now.”
“We had become strangers in our own families,” Léa continues. “We didn’t grow up with them, as they excluded us from family gatherings. They rejected us because of the Belgian state. I no longer had a name or an identity. My name was just Léa, and I didn’t have a date of birth.”
The mixed-race girls from the Katende mission stayed in touch, even though their life paths took them to different countries. Léa and Simone married Belgian men and ended up in Brussels. “We are even more like sisters than blood sisters; we grew up together,” Léa says quietly. As the years passed, these sisters met regularly, feeling the need to retrace their journey and rediscover their identity. This was especially true for Monique, who travelled to Congo to find colonial archives. “Why take away the children? For what reasons? That’s why we went to court,” Léa says.
“Whenever we met, we cried. We realized that what we had been through was not normal,” Simone recounts. The Belgian government apologized in March 2018, but no compensation was planned. “All I had left was ‘Papa State,’” she says. “Belgium ruined my life, and I am still wondering if it can be repaired,” adds Léa. “Words alone weren’t enough; action was needed. The decision brings us relief, partly because the story is now public knowledge and ‘Papa State’, as we called it, has been ordered to pay compensation. We applaud the courage of the Belgian justice system. When you make a mistake, you have to make amends.” Léa, like Simone, now wants to move forward.
“I was in contact with several sisters from other countries just before the verdict, in Chad, Rwanda, Nigeria, Canada. We talked, and many of them were very angry about what we had been through,” says Léa. But according to plaintiffs’ lawyer Michèle Hirsch, no other legal proceedings like those of the five Belgian-Congolese women have been initiated to date.
