All that remains of Congolese independence hero Patrice Lumumba, who was assassinated in 1961, is a tooth. Why did it take Belgium so long to return the remains to his family?
A gold-crowned tooth is all that remains of assassinated Congolese independence hero Patrice Lumumba.
"This is a reminder of what happened with the Nazis, taking pieces of people - and that's a crime against humanity," she told the BBC.Gerard Soete's daughter showed the tooth, in a padded box, to a photographer in 2016 This failure to acknowledge the past foreshadowed years of denial in Belgium, which it has only now begun to come to terms with.In an address that was not scheduled on the official programme, the prime minister spoke about the violence and degradation that the Congolese had suffered.
Some have said that with his speech Lumumba signed his own death warrant, but his murder the following year was also wrapped up in Cold War manoeuvres and a Belgian desire to maintain control. But she recognises that her father "belongs to the country, because he died for Congo… and for his own values and convictions of the dignity of the African person".
Lumumba was then placed under house arrest, escaped and re-arrested in December 1960, before being held in the west of the country. Armed with saws, sulphuric acid, face masks and whisky, Soete then led a team to move, destroy and dispose of the remains. It was a process that he was later to describe as travelling "to the depths of hell".
She said he had kept a private archive and though after his death in 2000 a lot was thrown away, she "was able to save interesting things".It was then seized by the Belgian police after De Witte filed a complaint and following a four-year legal battle, a court ruled that it should be returned to the Lumumba family.
"This is what we usually do in our culture, we like to bury our dead," said Congolese historian and the country's UN ambassador, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja.
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