<
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/01/mixed-race-kidnappings-belgian-congo-belgium>
"Monique was three years old when a white man from the government came to her
village and changed everything. Everyone came out to see him, including
Monique, who, as always, was with her “little auntie”, a girl of nine who was
also her best friend. Monique cannot recall what the man looked like, but she
remembers how sad everyone was after he had gone. Her mother had tears in her
eyes that night. Monique would not see her for a long time.
The next day, Monique set off early with her uncle, aunt and grandmother on a
three-day journey. Travelling on foot and by boat, with Monique in their arms,
they went more than 100 miles from her birth village, Babadi, in the southern
central Kasaï province in the Belgian Congo, to her new lodgings, the Catholic
mission of the sisters of Saint-Vincent-de Paul in Katende. It was 1953 – the
year Joseph Stalin died and Queen Elizabeth II was crowned – and Belgium still
ruled the Congo, a vast African territory 75 times its size.
Decades later, Monique remembers herself on the first day at the mission: a
tiny girl lost in a crowd, looking everywhere for her family, who had to leave
her there. “I cried, I cried, I cried, there was no one.” An older girl gave
her a slice of mango and took her in her arms. “From that day it was the end of
my life with my family,” she recalls.
Monique Bitu Bingi was one of many mixed-race children forcibly separated from
their parents and sequestered in religious institutions by the Belgian state
that ruled Congo, Burundi and Rwanda. Her Congolese mother was 15 when she was
born; her father was 32, a colonial official from a well-to-do family in Liège.
Monique’s existence – and thousands of other mixed-race children known as métis
(mixed race) – deeply alarmed the Belgian state, which viewed these babies as a
threat to the white supremacist colonial order.
Now more than 70 years after being taken away from her mother, Bitu Bingi and
four other women have accused Belgium of crimes against humanity for their
forced removal and placement in religious institutions. Bitu Bingi brings the
case with Léa Tavares Mujinga, Noëlle Verbeken, Simone Ngalula and Marie-José
Loshi, whom she describes as sisters. All five arrived in the Katende mission
between 1948 and 1953, aged three and four; the last left in 1961.
The five women, four of whom live in Belgium and one in France, await a ruling
from Belgium’s court of appeal this week, in what is likely to be a charged
moment in the country’s reckoning with its colonial past."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
