The Belgian colonizers who impregnated thousands of African women and then stole their children

Between 1920 and 1960, thousands of Belgian colonizers arrived in the Congo. These men—engineers, officers, civil servants, and laborers—were almost exclusively single and living far from their families back in Europe. Upon arrival, a dark and common pattern emerged: they would take an African woman into their homes under the guise of household labor—to clean, cook, and serve—but also for purposes that were never spoken of aloud. These relationships frequently resulted in pregnancies. Consequently, thousands of African women gave birth to mixed-race children, the offspring of Belgian fathers who refused to acknowledge them. These children were born with skin lighter than their mothers, bearing the physical features of white men who walked past them in the streets, pretending they were strangers.

By 1948, the presence of these children had become a perceived problem for the colonial administration. They were living, breathing proof that the policy of racial segregation was a failure. They stood as undeniable evidence that the “civilized” white men who preached racial superiority were sleeping with the African women they officially deemed inferior. The Belgian state decided to address this issue in the only way it knew how: through force. If the fathers would not claim these children and the State deemed them a social anomaly, the State would simply take them by force. The world watched, or perhaps looked away, as a European country orchestrated the systematic kidnapping of 20,000 children. The question remained: what did they do to these children after tearing them from their mothers? And what became of them when the Congo achieved independence in 1960 and the Belgians evacuated en masse? The answers are rooted in the events of 1948, when the first trucks began to rattle into remote villages, signaling a fate that mothers soon learned was impossible to outrun.

The Congo was a Belgian colony from 1908 to 1960. During those 52 years, Belgium extracted vast quantities of rubber, ivory, minerals, and timber, building national wealth upon the backs of millions of exploited Africans. There were strict, uncompromising rules: white people resided in designated European neighborhoods, while Africans were confined to their own. Interracial relationships were strictly prohibited; miscegenation was officially illegal. Yet, this was merely a paper law. In practice, thousands of Belgian colonizers lived with African concubines, impregnated them, and raised families in secret. By 1940, there were thousands of these mixed-race children, known as métis, scattered throughout the Congo, living in villages with their African mothers. Their Belgian fathers often saw them from a distance but never offered a surname, never registered them as legitimate heirs, and faced no repercussions for their abandonment.

Everything changed in 1948 when the colonial government created a special agency: the Office de Protection des Métis (the Office for the Protection of the Mestizos). Its official mandate was to protect children of mixed origin, provide them with an education, and prepare them to become “useful citizens.” The reality, however, was far more sinister. The agency began compiling meticulous lists—recording the children’s names, ages, villages of residence, physical descriptions, and the names of the Belgian fathers who had never acknowledged them.

Consider the story of Henri, an engineer who arrived in the Congo in 1943 at the age of 28. His path was identical to thousands of other settlers. Hired by a mining company with the promise of a high salary and a luxurious house, Henri saw the Congo as a safe haven to build a fortune while war tore Europe apart. When he arrived in Leopoldville, the capital, the stark reality of segregation was the first thing he noticed. The white population lived in Kalina, a district characterized by spacious houses with gardens, paved roads, electricity, and running water. The Africans lived in the Cité Indigène, confined to cramped zinc-and-mud shacks on dirt roads that lacked basic sanitation. Between these two worlds lay an invisible line that no one dared cross—or at least, no one admitted to crossing.

Henri was assigned to supervise a copper mine 200 kilometers from the capital. The company provided him with a large, empty house. Living alone, he dealt with his isolation like most other settlers: he hired an African woman to clean, cook, and wash his clothes. This arrangement included the unstated expectation of sexual service. In May 1944, Henri hired a 16-year-old girl named Sala from a nearby village. Her family was in desperate need of money, and working for a white settler offered the highest pay available. Initially, Sala worked only in the household, maintaining a professional distance and responding to Henri’s brief, cold orders. However, as the months passed, the isolation of the large house created an environment where Henri felt empowered to cross the forbidden line.

At 17, Sala had no real choice. Henri was her employer; in this colonial hierarchy, her survival and the financial support of her family depended entirely on him. When he summoned her to his room that night, she complied because refusal meant unemployment and potentially worse. By January 1945, Sala discovered she was pregnant. Henri showed no emotion—no surprise, no anger—simply telling her to continue working as long as possible. In September 1945, she gave birth to a daughter, Monique. The baby was visibly mixed-race, possessing Henri’s eye shape and nose, with skin much lighter than the other children in the village. Anyone who saw them together could deduce the truth, yet Henri never acknowledged the child. Legally, Monique was registered only under her mother’s name, with no father recorded. There was no official link between the Belgian engineer and the baby growing up in the African village. Everyone in the mine and the village knew the truth, but it was a secret kept behind a wall of silence.

By 1946, there were thousands of such children across the Congo. They occupied an agonizing middle ground—too light-skinned to be accepted by the African community and too African to be recognized by the colonial society. Monique grew up sensing this divide. Other children stared at her, and village mothers whispered when she passed. Sala did her best to protect her daughter, teaching her the local language, Kikongo, and instilling in her the customs of the village, hoping she would feel part of the community. But resentment persisted; Monique was living proof of the hypocrisy of the white settlers who preached moral superiority while violating their own laws of segregation.

The year 1948 marked a turning point. The colonial government decided that the métis population was a liability. They were tangible evidence that racial segregation was a sham. The administration sought to make them disappear from the public sphere, creating the agency to categorize and remove these children from their mothers under the guise of “protection.” Officials were sent to every corner of the Congo with instructions to compile comprehensive lists. By March 1948, they had identified 4,000 children between the ages of two and ten. They chose to start with the youngest—those between two and five years old—believing they would be easier to “mold” and would have less memory of their mothers.

When rumors reached Sala in April 1948, she was paralyzed by fear. Monique was two and a half years old and appeared on the lists. Sala considered fleeing or disguising the child, but she realized that the colonial authorities had complete records. They knew exactly where each child lived. She knew that resistance would only bring worse consequences. On a Tuesday in May, the truck arrived. Sala was cooking outside her cabin, and Monique was playing in the dirt nearby. When she heard the engine, she remained motionless, her heart sinking. Two men stepped out: a Belgian official and an African interpreter. After verifying Monique’s identity against their card, the official coldly informed Sala that she must hand over her daughter, claiming it was for the girl’s own good—a better life, an education, a chance to be “civilized.”

When Sala refused, the official signaled the driver, and a stronger man emerged to forcibly tear Monique from her mother’s arms. The girl screamed for her mother as Sala was pushed into the dust. As the truck pulled away, Sala ran after it until her lungs burned and her legs collapsed, eventually falling to her knees as the vehicle vanished around a bend. She knew, with a devastating certainty, that she would never see her daughter again.

Monique was taken to an orphanage in Katanga, 600 kilometers away. The red-brick building was filled with girls who had undergone the same trauma. Catholic nuns were waiting, ready to assign them numbers, strip them of their names, cut their hair, and dress them in uniform gray clothes. The nuns spoke French, while the children spoke only their native tongues, creating a barrier of silence and tears.

Three months later, a five-year-old named Simon Galula arrived, enduring the same fate. The conditions were brutal: overcrowded bunk beds, no mattresses, and a zinc roof that turned the rooms into ovens under the equatorial sun. The routine was rigid and unforgiving, governed by manual labor, constant prayer, and harsh corporal punishment. If a girl cried or spoke her native language, she was beaten with a ruler. The nuns were relentless in their efforts to “civilize” the children, frequently calling them savages and demanding gratitude for their supposed rescue. One night, Simon asked a haunting question: “Why do they hate us if we are their daughters?” There was no answer.

The situation became dire in 1960. As the Congolese pushed for independence, the Belgian government conceded. On June 30, 1960, the Congo would become a sovereign nation. While the colonial administration prepared to evacuate, the fate of the 20,000 métis children living in orphanages was conveniently ignored. Officials debated the morality of taking them to Belgium, but ultimately decided that European society was not “ready” for them. In an act of abandonment, the Belgian government simply walked away, leaving the children without documents, resources, or protection in a country descending into chaos.

Lea Tabáes Mujinga, who had spent eight years in an orphanage in Rwanda, witnessed this collapse at age 14. When the Mother Superior announced that the nuns were returning to Belgium, the girls were told they were Congolese and must stay behind. Lea, realizing the potential for violence, begged to be allowed to go to Belgium or be reunited with her mother, but the nuns claimed all records had been lost. On the day of independence, the nuns left, leaving 40 girls alone in an empty, looted building. When the Congolese army mutinied, the orphanage became a target for soldiers seeking revenge against the colonizers. The girls spent hours hiding in the dark basement, listening to the destruction above.

In the weeks that followed, these girls tried to survive in a war-torn country. Many, like Lea, had been taken so young they didn’t know their origins or their mothers’ names. When Lea attempted to obtain identification, the new government officials could not help her because she possessed no documentation. She was stateless—not Belgian, not Congolese—trapped in a bureaucratic limbo while her father lived a comfortable, pensioned life back in Antwerp with his legitimate family.

For five decades, this history remained buried. Belgium continued to be seen as a paragon of European democracy, while the systematic kidnapping of 20,000 children was erased from textbooks and public consciousness. The survivors, meanwhile, lived with profound trauma. Monique Vintu Binji worked as a domestic servant for decades, never marrying and never finding her mother. Simon Galula carried the memory of the beatings and the heat, keeping his past a secret from his own children to shield them from the shame. Lea eventually reached Belgium in the 1970s, but without a birth certificate or papers, she remained legally invisible, unable to marry or fully participate in society.

The tide began to turn in the 2000s as the internet allowed survivors to find one another. By 2015, they formed an organization, “Métis of Belgium,” to demand accountability. They pushed for the opening of archives and a formal apology. In 2016, the Catholic Church finally issued an apology for its role in the system, but the victims knew the Belgian state was the primary culprit. In 2017, the Belgian Senate held a colloquium where survivors testified, forcing politicians to confront a history they claimed never to have heard of.

In April 2018, Prime Minister Charles Michel issued an official acknowledgment of the systematic segregation, yet he avoided calling it a crime, opting for the softer term “injustice.” It wasn’t until March 2019 that the state issued a formal apology. However, for survivors like Monique, Simon, and Lea, words were insufficient. They sought legal recognition that their forced removal had been a crime against humanity. In 2021, five women filed a lawsuit against the Belgian state, seeking reparations. The state argued that the statute of limitations had expired and that the actions, while wrong by modern standards, were not illegal at the time.

After an initial rejection, the case reached the Brussels Court of Appeal. On December 2, 2024, the courtroom was filled with survivors, journalists, and activists. These five women—Monique, Simon, Lea, Noele, and Marie José—had waited their entire lives to see the state held accountable. They had survived a systematic attempt to erase their identities, and finally, they stood on the threshold of a judgment that would define whether their suffering—and the suffering of thousands of others—would finally be recognized as the historic crime they had always known it to be. The weight of 50 years of silence hung in the air as they awaited the verdict that would finally validate their existence and demand a reckoning for the past.