A/HRC/42/59/Add.1 State, which became a colony under Belgian control, remaining so until 1960. 1 It was reported that the forced labour system continued. This exploitation of Congolese bodies for labour and Belgian profit evolved into a new and different form during the First World War, when tens of thousands of Congolese people were conscripted as porters for the Belgian army. The forced labour system changed significantly only in the early 1920s. 10. Other relevant historical developments include the colonial propaganda around the role of Belgium in civilizing Africa, the establishment of human zoos in Belgium and the forced removal of children. In 1897, King Leopold II imported 267 Congolese persons to be exhibited in a “human zoo” around his colonial palace in Tervuren, east of Brussels. Seven of them died of pneumonia and/or influenza. A permanent exhibition was later established at the site, initially called the Museum of the Congo and since renamed the Royal Museum for Central Africa. A human zoo exhibit of Congolese people in 1958 was smaller in scale, but similar in content. The display advertised a “typical” village, where Congolese people spent their days by straw huts, engaged in crafts. The Congolese people on display were among 598 people – 273 men, 128 women and 197 children comprising 183 families – who were brought from Africa to staff the wider fair. Many complained of poor living conditions, significant restrictions on their movement and interactions, and daily abuse at the fair. These human zoos were racist, abusive and dehumanizing. In 2002, a human zoo exhibit involving eight Baka “pygmies” from the tropical forests of Cameroon was set up in the Rainforest natural park in the village of Yvoir in Wallonia. Three weeks after the show opened, it became the object of public protests by Belgians of African descent and others. The protestors made the point that, as a human zoo, the project was as morally reprehensible as its predecessor at the Exposition Universelle in Tervuren in 1897. Finally, between 1959 and 1962, an estimated 20,000 children born to white fathers and African mothers in Belgian-colonized Burundi, Congo 2 and Rwanda, were abducted and sent to Belgium for adoption from 1959 to 1962. 11 The Working Group was informed that most sub-Saharan Africans who had migrated to Belgium in recent decades had come from the former Belgian colonies in Africa: Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) and Rwanda. For reasons of language, most of them decided to settle in the French-speaking parts of Belgium. The first Africans settling in Flanders came from the Belgian (or post-independence) Congo and Ruanda-Urundi – later Rwanda and Burundi – during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and their highest concentration is in the city of Antwerp. 3 12. According to a recent study by the King Baudouin Foundation, the population of people of African descent living in Belgium is estimated to be 110,000.4 Belgo-Burundian, Belgo-Congolese and Belgo-Rwandan people form the third-largest group in Belgium stemming from immigration from outside the European Union. 5 These citizens are not often 1 2 3 4 5 4 For further information on the history of the Congo Free State under King Leopold II in the 1880s and 1890s and on the colonial exploitations of Belgium in Africa, see United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa, “Africa under colonial domination 1880–1935”, General History of Africa, vol. VII (1985); Roger Casement and others, Casement Report (London, His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1904), available at https://archive.org/details/CasementReport/page/n1; Commission of Enquiry (“the Leopold Commission”), The Congo: a report of the Commission of enquiry appointed by the Congo Free State Government (Brussels, 1905); and Edmund D. Morel, Red Rubber: The Story of the Rubber Slave Trade Flourishing on the Congo in the Year of Grace 1906 (New York, The Nassau Print, 1906). References to “the Congo” in the present report are to the country that is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, known as the Congo Free State from 1877 to 1908, the Belgian Congo from 1908 to 1960, the Republic of the Congo from 1960 to 1964, the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1964 to 1971 and Zaire from 1971 to 1997. See https://kifkif.be. King Baudouin Foundation, Des citoyens aux racines africaines : un portrait des Belgo-Congolais, Belgo-Rwandais et Belgo-Burundais (Brussels, 2017). The Flemish government conducted a similar survey for people of Congolese descent in 2017 entitled the “Living together in diversity survey”. Available at: samenleven-indiversiteit.vlaanderen.be/rapport.