A gold-capped tooth belonging to Patrice Lumumba, who fought for the independence of Congo, has been returned to his family by Belgium 61 years after he was murdered.
The move to return the tooth to Lumumba’s children was made by the former colonial power as part of its recognition of its bloody exploitation of the central African nation that went on for decades.
In 1961, separatists and Belgian mercenaries murdered Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which was known by its earlier name the Republic of Congo.
In 2000, former Belgian police commissioner Gerard Soete admitted in a Dutch documentary that he had dismembered Lumumba’s body and dissolved it in acid. His teeth were the only part of his body that remained.
At a ceremony on Monday 20 June, Lumumba’s children were handed his gold-capped tooth at the Egmont Palace in Brussels. It was placed in a casket that will be taken to the DRC embassy before it is repatriated.
The return of the tooth means his family in the DRC would be able to “finish their mourning”, Lumumba’s son Roland said last week.
At the ceremony for the return of the tooth, Belgian prime minister Alexander de Croo said: “This is a painful and disagreeable truth, but must be spoken. A man was murdered for his political convictions, his words, his ideals.”
Earlier this month, King Philippe of Belgium made his first visit to the DRC, but he did not make a formal apology for his country’s brutal treatment of the Congolese people.
He expressed “deepest regrets for the wounds of the past” and described a “regime... of unequal relations, unjustifiable in itself, marked by paternalism, discrimination and racism” that “led to violent acts and humiliations”.
Lumumba became the first democratically elected leader of DRC in 1960. Western officials worried that he would favour the Soviet Union and allow the bloc access to valuable resources such as uranium.
Within a year, at the age of 35, he was jailed, tortured and killed by a firing squad following a military coup. The CIA also had plans to kill him.
Lumumba’s tooth was seized by Belgian authorities after Belgian academic Ludo de Witte filed a complaint in 2016 against Godelieve Soete, the daughter of the man who destroyed Lumumba’s body.
Soete’s daughter had reportedly shown a gold tooth, which she said had belonged to Lumumba, during an interview with a newspaper.
The DRC government has declared three days of official mourning before the tooth is buried in DRC’s capital Kinshasa at the end of June.
