Mixed Race Studies

The children colonial Belgium stole from African mothers

Al Jazeera
2021-02-03

Annette Ekin
Brussels, Belgium

An archive photo showing children at Save, a key institution to which stolen mixed-race children were taken [Courtesy of metisbe.squarespace.com]

Taken from their mothers in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi, decades on a group of mixed-race elderly people are fighting the Belgian state for recognition and reparations.

Monique Bitu Bingi, 71, has never forgotten how it happened.

It was 1953 when the white colonials came for her in Babadi, a village in the Kasai region of what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), then a Belgian colony. She was four, the child of a Black Congolese woman and a white Belgian colonial agent. Because she was mixed-race, she would be forced to leave her family and live at a Catholic mission. If she stayed, there would be repercussions: the men – farmers, hunters and protectors of the village – would be forcibly recruited into military duty and taken away. When the time came to leave, her mother was not there to say goodbye. She had left, unable to watch her daughter go.

Monique remembers travelling with her uncle, aunt and grandmother who carried her. She could tell something was wrong from her grandmother’s sadness. They walked west for about two days, crossed a river and slept in cabins used for drying cotton. When they reached Dimbelenge they hitched a ride northwest on a truck carrying the body of a woman who had died in childbirth. It was headed for Katende, in today’s Kasai Central province, where the St Vincent de Paul sisters’ mission was. Monique fell asleep. It must have been a Wednesday because weddings happened on Wednesdays and when she awoke outside the mission she saw a young Congolese couple, the bride dressed in white, and strangers everywhere. But her own family was gone. She remembers walking through the crowd, crying, until an older girl from the mission brought her inside to the others.

Among the countless abuses committed by the Belgian state during its colonial occupation of the Congo from 1908 to 1960, taking over from the exploitative and violent rule of King Leopold II which killed millions of Congolese, and its control from 1922 to 1962 under a League of Nations mandate in Ruanda-Urundi (today Rwanda and Burundi), is the little-known systematic abduction of biracial children from their maternal families…

Read the entire article here.

Belgium apology for mixed-race kidnappings in colonial era

BBC News
2019-04-04

Many mixed-race people were in parliament to watch Mr Michel apologise

Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel has apologised for the kidnapping of thousands of children born to mixed-race couples during colonial rule in Burundi, DR Congo and Rwanda.

The “métis” children born to Belgian settlers and local women were forcibly taken to Belgium and fostered by Catholic orders and other institutions.

About 20,000 children are believed to have been affected.

Most fathers refused to acknowledge the paternity of their children.

The children were born in the 1940s and 1950s and taken to Belgium from 1959 until the independence of each of the three colonies.

Some of the children never received Belgian nationality and remained stateless.

Speaking in the Belgian parliament, Mr Michel said the country had breached the children’s basic human rights, seeing them as a threat to the colonial system.

It had, he said, stripped them of their identity, stigmatised them and split up siblings…

Read the entire article here.

Katanga’s forgotten people

FRANCE 24
2010-03-16

Marlène Rabaud

Arnaud Zajtman

Like many mixed-race children in Congo, they were born of a Japanese father who came to work in the mines of Katanga in south-east of the country. Today, they accuse their fathers of wanting to kill them so as not to leave behind any traces when they returned to Japan. FRANCE 24 met these men and women seeking the recognition that has always been denied them.

Watch the video (00:10:51) here.

Footprints of my other

2012
52 minutes

Claude Haffner

Born to a mixed race couple in the DRC, then Zaire, in the 1970s, Claude Haffner is part Congolese, part French.

From her family home in France, Claude Haffner embarks on a journey in search of her African identity. She is of mixed race, born in 1976 to a French father and a Congolese mother in Zaïre (today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo). Pierre Haffner, her father, passed away in 2000, and having become a specialist on African art and cinema, he left behind a collection of African art together with photos and taped accounts about Congo and Africa. This is the starting point of Claude’s investigation. She delves into their shared material, intellectual and psychological heritage. She interviews her mother who still lives in France about her country, her family and her history. In the search of answers to her questions she returns, alone this time, to Mbuji-Mayi, the capital of Kasaï and the centre of the diamond trade. Michou, her cousin travels with her to the heart of the diamond fields. Despite unemployment, poverty and lack of activity the inhabitants of Mbuji-Mayi remain hopeful owing to the new governor’s development policies.