A gold crown tooth of Pan-African hero Patrice Lumumba has been returned to his family 61 years after his assassination.
The gold tooth is all that remains of the Congolese independence hero and former Prime Minister. According to reports, the Belgian police commissioner who oversaw the brutal assassination and mutilation of Lumumba took the tooth as a war trophy.
In 1961, shortly after the independence of Congo a year before, Belgium – which was not impressed by Lumumba’s determination to get rid of colonialism in the country, captured and assassinated him.
A 34-years-old led Congo to her independence from Belgium on June 30, 1960. A committee was set up to organize an election which elected Joseph Kasavubu as president, Patrice Lumumba as prime minister, senators, house of assembly members, and provincial heads.
On orders from Belgium, Lumumba was arrested and assassinated by a firing squad in 1961, and his body was buried in a shallow grave. As if that was not enough cruelty, the body was dug up and transported to another grave 125 miles away.
Then police commissioner of the Belgian forces, Gerard Soete, received further orders to exhume and hack the body into pieces before dissolving it in acid. Belgium was determined to erase every trace of the independence hero.
Soete would later confess that while carrying out his orders to hack and dissolve Lumumba’s body in acid, he picked his golden tooth, which did not dissolve, as a souvenir. He also claimed that there were another tooth and two fingers that didn’t dissolve, but their whereabouts are unknown.
Last week, the golden tooth which Gerard Soete took from Lumumba’s corpse was returned to the family in a private ceremony in Brussels.
In a 1999 documentary, Soete admitted to taking the tooth and fingers as “a type of hunting trophy.”
Reacting to the documentary, Lumumba’s daughter, Juliana, could not help but ask whether Soete and the other perpetrators were human.
“What amount of hatred must you have to do that?” she asks.
“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.
More reactions have continued to trail the handing over ceremony of Lumumba’s tooth back to the family. Many critics are of the opinion that the ceremony bears no significance and should not be seen as redemption for the crimes of the past.
Others, however, believe that Africans should not become propagators of hatred by judging the good intentions of the current Belgian authorities with the crimes of our colonial masters.
They claim that the current Belgium leader, King Philippe, who has been vocal about his distaste for colonial activities carried out by his country in Congo, should be commended.
King Philippe of Belgium made a historic visit to DR Congo earlier this month, where he once again condemned what he referred to as “his country’s rule over the vast central African country that had inflicted pain and humiliation through a mixture of paternalism, discrimination and racism.”
“This regime was one of an unequal relationship, in itself unjustifiable, marked by paternalism, discriminations and racism,” Philippe said.
What are your thoughts? Do you think Belgium deserves redemption for its recent activities to reconcile the activities of the colonial era?