A new story is being told today, 20 June, between Belgium and its former colony, the DRC. A few days after King Philippe’s trip to the DRC, Belgium returns a tooth of Patrice Lumumba, the former Congolese prime minister who was tortured and shot in 1961, to the children of the Congolese independence hero.
The tooth, which has the value of a “relic”, is contained in a bright blue box and officially handed over to the Lumumba family at the Egmont Palace in Brussels by the Belgian federal prosecutor, Frédéric Van Leeuw.
“It is not normal that the body of one of the founding fathers of the Congolese nation has been kept for six decades in obscure circumstances, never really clarified, but what is known does not make us proud,” said Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo at the ceremony.
His return marks the end of a long campaign by the Lumumba children for their father to have a final resting place. “Father, we mourned your death without having made a funeral oration (…) our duty as descendants was to offer a dignified burial,” said his daughter Juliana, with tears.
This tooth is the only known remnant of Lumumba, whose body was dissolved in acid to prevent his final resting place from becoming a place of pilgrimage. The return of this tooth should allow the family to mourn and the DRC to complete the construction of the “Patrice Lumumba Memorial” currently underway in the country on a major axis where a statue of the national hero already stands. During the handover ceremony broadcast live on Belgian public television, the prosecutor pledged to continue the investigation of the case opened in 2011 for “war crimes”.
The coffin will leave on Tuesday evening for Kinshasa where a burial ceremony is to be organised on 30 June, the anniversary of the country’s independence.
Lumbumba was the Prime Minister of the DRC. He was assassinated on 17 January 1961 with his companions Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo, a few months after the independence of the former Belgian Congo, which later became Congo, then Zaire before becoming the Democratic Republic of Congo. Their bodies were then dissolved in acid. In 2016, the courts seized a tooth in the affairs of Gérard Soete, one of the Belgian officers responsible for removing all traces of Patrice Lumumba.
