The 60-year, 4,000-mile journey house of Lumumba’s tooth
The coffin was fabricated from black wenge, a hardwood identified for its resilience. Its journey started 10 days earlier than on a gray avenue in Brussels. It was carried by way of the Belgian capital to a ceremony at a Sixteenth-century palace, then pushed to the Congolese embassy, to a public sq. for a viewing and, lastly, to the airport. It was lifted on to a airplane and flown throughout the Mediterranean to Tunis and on to the Democratic Republic of Congo, a distance of some 4,000 miles.
What made the casket uncommon was not the size of its journey however what was inside: a single, gold-capped molar. It belonged to Patrice Lumumba, the anti-colonial hero, pan-African nationalist and the DRC’s first democratically elected prime minister, who was tortured and assassinated in 1961.
I noticed the coffin on a late-June day in Kinshasa, because it neared its ultimate vacation spot. Escorted by a navy band, it was carried by way of the grounds of L’Echangeur, a tower inbuilt 1974 as a monument to Lumumba. The grounds have been full of individuals, the ambiance each solemn and celebratory. There have been chants of “père de la patrie” (father of the nation) and “héros des opprimés” (hero of the oppressed). A gaggle of Lumumba lookalikes wore tailor-made fits, skinny ties and semi-rimless glasses, their hair neatly parted to at least one aspect. “Lumumba is the Jesus of Africa, we have to pray to him!” somebody shouted from behind a fence.
“He’s our father and, lastly, after 61 years, we will mourn,” Juliana Amato Lumumba, his daughter, advised me. “Bringing him again to his nation of life, to his ancestors . . . that’s vital.” Authorities ministers and visiting dignitaries sat underneath the cover of an enormous Congolese flag and watched as a purpose-built mausoleum grew to become the coffin’s final cease.
Patrice Émery Lumumba was 35 years outdated when he was killed by firing squad on January 17 1961. A tall, slim man with excessive cheekbones, he was a gifted orator who led his occasion, the Mouvement Nationwide Congolais, to victory within the DRC’s first elections after the nation declared independence from Belgium in 1960. He had been prime minister for lower than three months when he was deposed in a coup supported by the previous colonial energy and the US. A couple of months later, Lumumba was arrested, tortured and shot to demise by political opponents within the hostile province of Katanga. His homicide occurred within the presence of Belgian officers.
Lumumba’s physique and people of two colleagues who had been travelling with him, Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo, have been by no means discovered. Many years later, a Belgian police commissioner within the Congo named Gerard Soete confessed that he and his brother had been given the job of disposing of the three our bodies. They minimize the corpses into items, in line with a thinly fictionalised e-book Soete wrote in 1978, titled The Enviornment: the story of the demise of Lumumba.
On the time of its publication, few appeared to understand it was based mostly in reality. Soete had described the grisly scene within the third particular person, writing: “As quickly as they put the our bodies close to the empty barrels and assemble their gear, they realise that they aren’t ready for that type of job. They return to the automotive and drink whisky . . . When he’s left with solely the torso and the pinnacle, he out of the blue realises the horror of what he’s doing . . . ”
Ludo De Witte, a Belgian sociologist who wrote a groundbreaking account of the homicide and its causes a long time later, defined that “the a part of [Soete’s] e-book which recounts his exploits . . . must be learn as genuine testimony”. Over lunch in Brussels, De Witte advised me that Soete had confessed to him that he took Lumumba’s enamel as a trophy. Within the e-book, Soete gave a special motive: “Right here is the one materials proof of the Prophet’s demise. If a cult of martyrdom ever appeared, he may present it with relics. He takes some pincers out of the software bag, and extricates with problem two gold enamel from the Prophet’s higher jaw.”
Soete and his brother dissolved the remainder of the physique elements in vats of sulphuric acid that belonged to the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, the corporate established by King Léopold II in 1906 to use the Congo’s mineral sources, whose profitability Belgium was so intent on defending from Lumumba’s nationalist motion.
De Witte’s painstakingly researched e-book prompted a furore on its publication in 1999, main Belgium to arrange a parliamentary inquiry into its duty for the killing. In a 2000 documentary, Soete admitted having two of Lumumba’s enamel however then mentioned he had thrown them into the North Sea. He died that very same yr. Throughout an interview with a Belgian journal in 2015, his daughter confirmed one gold-capped tooth in a padded field. De Witte complained to the police, and Belgian authorities lastly confiscated the tooth.
4 years later, Lumumba’s household have been nonetheless ready for restitution. In June 2020, on the top of the Black Lives Matter protests within the US, Lumumba’s daughter Juliana wrote to King Philippe of Belgium. “We, Lumumba’s youngsters, name for the simply return of the relics of Patrice Émery Lumumba to the land of his ancestors,” she wrote. “Why, after his horrible homicide, have Lumumba’s stays been condemned to stay a soul endlessly wandering . . . used on the one hand as trophies by a few of your fellow residents, and on the opposite as funereal possessions sequestered by your kingdom’s judiciary?”
Three months later, a Belgian court docket lastly cleared the way in which for the tooth to be returned to the DRC. The Covid-19 pandemic delayed the handover, however in 2022 the ultimate stage of its journey started.
The day earlier than the tooth was laid to relaxation within the mausoleum, it was taken in its casket to the Lumumba household residence in Gombe, an upmarket riverside district that’s house to Kinshasa’s political elite and its embassies. Because it was carried by way of the doorway, a choir of two dozen girls sang: “Hear, hear, the promise we made to Lumumba, we need to maintain it till at this time. We surprise concerning the demise of Lumumba. Who ordered the demise of Lumumba?”
A conventional chief named Konde Omekonga Lokolonga led a musical ceremony to welcome the tooth and to appease spirits that had been rattled by the homicide. He wore a ceremonial leopard-skin cap and drummed an elondja, a tubular instrument, painted with leopard-like spots.
“I’m very completely satisfied for the return of Lumumba since his soul, till now, was wandering right here and there,” Lokolonga advised me. “The spirits are completely satisfied as a result of Lumumba’s relics have returned. The Congolese are completely satisfied as nicely.”
Lokolonga defined that within the Congolese non secular custom, a single a part of a physique — a nail, a clump of hair, a bone or tooth — may symbolize the entire particular person and that its burial would enable its soul to relaxation in peace. The folks I spoke to not often referred to it as la dent (the tooth), however relatively as le corps (the physique). Earlier than arriving in Kinshasa, it had first travelled to Onalua, Lumumba’s birthplace, then to Kisangani, the place he had labored as a civil servant and constructed his political profile, after which to Shilatembo, the place he had been killed.
One among Lumumba’s grandchildren, Yema, a 30-year-old journalist, flew in from her house within the Netherlands. “We’re Bantu. We transmit our historical past by way of symbols,” she mentioned, as we sat within the backyard of the household home. She was referring to the cluster of a number of ethno-linguistic teams that span huge elements of Africa. “All these funeral vigils that we’ve accomplished all around the nation are symbolic, however additionally they present that he’s come house, that his spirit can settle down and that it’s our flip, as soon as we’ve buried him, to proceed his path and his work.”
No DNA take a look at had been carried out as a result of it may have destroyed the tooth, Belgian officers mentioned. “We’ve got sufficient proof to say that it’s, successfully, the tooth of Patrice Lumumba,” Eric Van Duyse, spokesman for the Belgian federal prosecutor’s workplace, advised me in Brussels, citing a “clear line” of testimonies, together with from Soete. “However we don’t have the DNA proof as, in session with the household, we determined to not do it.”
Roland Lumumba was two years outdated when his father was killed. In February 1961, his mom Pauline Opango marched by way of Léopoldville, now Kinshasa, with about 100 others to demand the return of her husband’s physique for burial. She carried Roland in her arms. At present, he’s president of the Patrice Lumumba Basis, which works to protect his father’s legacy by way of arts and tradition. “The Belgians have been accountable however weren’t alone on the bottom,” he advised me on the Congolese embassy in Brussels, the place the casket was on show for the diaspora to pay tribute. “However the Belgians had the braveness to say they have been accountable. Now, if you wish to know the entire fact, it goes on. It doesn’t finish right here at this time.”
Some Congolese imagine that Lumumba was a marked man from the second he made a speech on the day of the nation’s independence, June 30 1960, at a ceremony within the Palais de la Nation, the constructing initially created because the residence of the colonial governor-general. The then-King Baudouin of Belgium spoke first, saying that the independence was the results of “the genius of King Léopold II”.
This reference to Léopold, who had dominated the Congo as his private fiefdom and whose colonising of the nation led to slavery, beheadings and the amputation of arms as punishments for employees, and an estimated 10 million deaths, was outrageous to many Congolese. The king went on to assert that for 80 years, Belgium had despatched “the very best of her sons” to the Congo and patronisingly added: “Don’t change the buildings that Belgium arms over to you till you’re positive you are able to do higher . . . It’s your job, gents, to point out that we have been proper in trusting you.”
The king’s speech was adopted by an uncontroversial handle by the brand new Congolese president, Joseph Kasavubu. Then, regardless of no point out of it within the official programme, prime minister Lumumba took the stage. His phrases have been a pointed rebuke to the condescension of the Belgian monarch: “Though this independence of the Congo is being proclaimed at this time by settlement with Belgium . . . no Congolese will ever overlook that independence was received in battle, a persevering and impressed battle carried on from daily . . . crammed with tears, fireplace and blood. We’re deeply pleased with our battle,” he continued, “as a result of it was simply and noble and indispensable in placing an finish to the humiliating bondage compelled upon us. That was our lot for the 80 years of colonial rule and our wounds are too contemporary and far too painful to be forgotten.”
Lumumba’s handle was met with a standing ovation. However it didn’t go down nicely with the king, the assembled Belgians or different western observers. A dispatch that ran in The Guardian was headlined “Marred”, and described King Baudouin behaving “with nice dignity” regardless of “a speech by Lumumba, which may solely be described as offensive”.
When the Belgian parliamentary inquiry reported its findings in 2001, it highlighted the speech as a second that “confirmed the mutual mistrust between Lumumba and the Belgian authorities, which undoubtedly influenced tinheritor reactions to the following occasions”. It concluded that members of the Belgian authorities “and different Belgian figures” had “an ethical duty within the circumstances which led to the demise of Lumumba”, although it fell in need of accepting any obligation.
Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, a Congolese historian, Lumumba biographer and Congo’s UN ambassador, argues that, even now, Belgium has not absolutely acknowledged its function. “They’re those, alongside america, that plotted it,” he advised me. “America has a really quick, weak reminiscence, and 1961 is simply too far behind us now.”
A number of archival paperwork testify to the American authorities’s want to eliminate Lumumba on the time. In August 1960, the pinnacle of the CIA, Allen Dulles, telegrammed his station chief in Léopoldville: “If [Lumumba] continues to carry excessive workplace, the inevitable outcome will at finest be chaos and at worst pave the way in which to Communist takeover of the Congo with disastrous penalties for the status of UN and for the pursuits of the free world typically . . . His removing have to be an pressing and prime goal and that underneath present situations this must be a excessive precedence of our covert motion.”
Within the days after Congo grew to become impartial, a mutiny started within the drive publique, the nation’s armed forces, which consisted of some 25,000 underpaid Congolese troopers overseen by a thousand Belgian officers. Lumumba tried to placate the military by eradicating senior officers and permitting the so-called Africanisation of the management corps. However occasions ran away from him. As troopers rebelled in several elements of the Congo, some murdered and raped Belgian residents. The Belgian authorities determined to intervene militarily and reoccupy elements of its former colony.
It additionally supported the secession of Katanga, the mineral-rich province the place the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga was based mostly and the supply of a lot of Belgium’s wealth. In response, Lumumba and Kasavubu despatched a telegram requesting pressing navy assist from the UN. “Think about unsolicited Belgian operation as act of aggression towards our nation,” they wrote. “Accuse Belgian authorities of detailed preparation of Katangan secession to retain grip on our nation.”
The UN agreed to ship a peacekeeping drive however declined to intervene in Katanga. Lumumba despatched a second determined message, this time to Moscow: “May very well be induced to request intervention by Soviet Union if western camp doesn’t terminate act of aggression towards sovereignty . . . lives of president of republic and prime minister at risk.”
The historian David Van Reybrouck says that this telegram, “in a single swoop, opened a brand new entrance within the chilly battle”. Western officers anxious that by way of Lumumba, the Soviet Union would acquire a foothold in central Africa, in addition to entry to mineral sources together with uranium. Fairly than the independence day speech, it could have been this telegram that in the end grew to become Lumumba’s demise warrant. “Lumumba was a nationalist, sure. A pan-Africanist, sure. Somebody with social consciousness who wished an impartial Congo, sure. However he was not a communist,” Jean Omasombo Tshonda, a political scientist on the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium, advised me. “He was making an attempt to make impartial Congo work at a time of bother.”
Lumumba’s assassination sparked demonstrations in London, Belgrade, Cairo, Moscow and New Delhi. Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru known as it “a world crime of the primary magnitude”. Ghana’s independence hero and the daddy of African nationalism, Kwame Nkrumah, slammed the UN for not intervening: “The primary time in historical past that the authorized ruler of a rustic has been accomplished to demise with the open connivance of a world organisation.” Later, the Argentine-Cuban revolutionary, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, decried the assassination in a fiery speech earlier than the UN.
It’s not possible to know what sort of prime minister Lumumba would have been if he had not been ousted, or how he would have modified the Congo if he had not been killed. However it’s arduous to think about he may have been worse than the person who acquired the assist of Belgium and the US: Joseph-Désiré Mobutu. He took energy in a coup in 1965, renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko, renamed the nation Zaire, and dominated as a dictator for 32 years. His kleptocratic regime looted the state for many years.
The president of Congo works from a modernist compound on the crest of a hill on the outskirts of Kinshasa that overlooks the Congo river. Félix Tshisekedi is a burly man with rimless glasses, who speaks confidently, regularly punctuating his sentences with a smile. Wearing brown slacks and a relaxed grey-blue jacket, he sat on a cream leather-based couch between two shiny blue and yellow cushions. “He’s a real icon,” Tshisekedi mentioned of Lumumba. “Regardless of the various generations that got here and went, and that is the third era since Lumumba, he’s nonetheless considered an icon.”
Tshisekedi understood the ability of the second Lumumba’s tooth lastly got here house. The federal government had put a Congolese film-maker, Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda, answerable for organising the celebrations. Within the week of the burial, the flags on authorities buildings have been flown at half mast and the capital was plastered with billboards thanking the héros nationwide. On the ceremony, Tshisekedi advised the assembled crowd that the nation was lastly in a position to finish the interval of mourning that had begun 61 years earlier than.
Not everybody was completely satisfied about Lumumba’s legacy being utilized by politicians from different events. Joseph Anganda, a senior member of Lumumba’s occasion, believes that Congolese governments, beginning with Mobutu and persevering with with Tshisekedi, have taken benefit of Lumumba’s story. “Persons are not sufficiently knowledgeable concerning the fact,” he advised me. “The federal government is making an attempt to get issues on its aspect, however Félix Tshisekedi comes from political tendencies which might be against the model and insurance policies of Patrice Lumumba.”
Tshisekedi took workplace in 2019, after it was introduced that he had won the presidential election. However opposition politicians and the Catholic Church instantly questioned the outcome. The church issued a press release saying the outcome didn’t correspond with the information from its tens of 1000’s of observers monitoring the vote. FT evaluation of two separate collections of voting knowledge confirmed that his opponent Martin Fayulu was the clear winner. Tshisekedi has repeatedly denied fraud. Presidential elections are as a consequence of be held in December this yr, and a few analysts take into account it probably that he’ll win, this time most likely legitimately.
As I stood on a balcony overlooking Lumumba’s casket in Kinshasa’s Palais de la Nation, Marie Misamu Bakala, a 62-year-old janitor, squeezed herself by way of the door, in between dignitaries, to have the ability to see “papa Lumumba” for the primary and final time. She was solely a yr outdated when he was killed, however remembered her mother and father talking fondly of him. She broke into tears. “Papa is house, lastly,” she whispered. “It has been too lengthy.” “There’s a historic trauma amongst many Congolese at this time,” Mona Pembele, a Congolese-Belgian activist, advised me. Lots of the older folks I spoke to felt anger or grief. The intervention of their nation’s nascent democracy, the brutal therapy of their elected prime minister, occurred inside residing reminiscence.
In Brussels, a number of weeks earlier, I had spoken to a nurse, Tima Kamba, who had moved to Belgium from the Congo as a baby. She had come to wave goodbye to the casket at Place Patrice Lumumba, the sq. named in his honour. “After 60 years, the Belgian authorities says it has an ethical duty. However the Belgian authorities has been concerned within the demise of papa Lumumba from the start until the tip. Ethical duty?” She was incredulous. “The Congolese love the Belgians, however Belgium doesn’t know the best way to love the Congolese. All as a result of there’s a historic drawback. They don’t know the best way to love us as a result of they’ve our blood on their arms.”
The Congolese author In Koli Jean Bofane, who has lived in Belgium since 1993, felt the ceremonies across the tooth’s return shouldn’t disguise the horror of its historical past. “The entire thing is macabre,” he mentioned, as we drank Congolese beer and ate grilled plantains in Brussels’ African quarter, Matonge. “Think about that the assassins of John Fitzgerald Kennedy come to let you know how they killed him and saved a tooth or a finger. How would Individuals really feel?” On a avenue nook close to the restaurant, Congolese-Belgian artists had put up an enormous papier-mâché reproduction of the tooth.
Lumumba believed in democracy and the rule of regulation. In a letter smuggled out of the cell by which he was saved within the ultimate days earlier than his demise, he wrote with determined readability: “The penal code in impact within the Congo expressly stipulates the prisoner have to be taken earlier than the analyzing Justice of the Peace investigating the fees on the day following his arrest on the very newest . . . Regardless of the circumstances, the prisoner is entitled to a lawyer . . . No warrant for our arrest has been served. We’ve got merely been saved in a military camp for thirty-four days, in punishment cells.”
No one with energy listened. No legal professionals got here. As De Witte recounts in his e-book, an ally of Lumumba tried to offer the letter to the UN secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, who was visiting the DRC on the time. Hammarskjöld, a Swede, reportedly turned purple and requested that or not it’s given to his non-public secretary. Simply 5 months earlier, Hammarskjöld had advised a US consultant on the UN that he believed the “state of affairs in Congo wouldn’t be straightened out till Lumumba was handled” and that Lumumba have to be “damaged”.
The tooth’s return has reopened the talk over what precisely Belgium owes to Congo and what different colonial powers owe to their former colonies. The Royal Museum for Central Africa outdoors Brussels comprises some 84,000 objects; in February final yr, it gave an inventory of its stock to the DRC to permit for an investigation into their provenance. “That is greater than a tooth,” Amory Lumumba, one other grandchild, advised me over jambon-fromage at a bakery in Kinshasa. “It’s about what it represents.”
But the tooth additionally had a selected energy of its personal. It spent a long time hidden in a overseas land, the trophy of a person who brutalised and dismembered its proprietor. Its grim existence proved one thing about Belgium’s colonial historical past that the nation’s establishments had labored to overlook. In Brussels, Alexander De Croo, Belgium’s prime minister, spoke candidly concerning the contradiction between the humane democracy he hoped to symbolize and the fact of the Belgian authorities’s actions six a long time in the past. In a speech earlier than Lumumba’s household on the Palais d’Egmont, he mentioned: “A person was assassinated for his political convictions, his phrases, his beliefs. For the democrat that I’m, it’s indefensible. For the liberal that I’m, it’s unacceptable. And for the human that I’m, it’s odious.”
At present, the DRC stays one of many poorest nations on the earth, broken by corruption, a long time of kleptocratic authorities and insurgent militia teams. But its mineral deposits — it’s Africa’s largest copper producer and the supply of half of the world’s cobalt — proceed to draw the curiosity of personal corporations, militias and nation states, together with China. The Kinshasa mausoleum by which the tooth now lies, which reportedly value $2.4mn, was constructed by a Chinese language firm. Above it’s a solid bronze statue of Lumumba that was erected in 2002 by a North Korean state-controlled building firm.
Not like the Lumumba who was caught on film simply after his ultimate arrest — a cowed, crushed man in a short-sleeved shirt, whose beard had been shorn, whose eyes are glazed over with ache and dread — this model of the nation’s first prime minister seems to be proudly over the capital metropolis, his swimsuit jacket buttoned, his expression agency and decided. One among his arms is raised, as if in greeting, or farewell.
Andres Schipani is the FT’s east and central Africa bureau chief
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