Dylan Bettencourt
Belgium has returned to its home country the only remains of the Congolese independence hero Patrice Lumumba – a gold tooth.
Lumumba was shot dead in 1961 by the former colonial power. His body was buried in a shallow grave, then removed and transported 200 kilometres to be buried again.
But there was an unexpected change of plan and instead his body was hacked to pieces and dissolved in acid.
However, then-Belgian Police Commissioner Gerard Soete, who supervised the operation, revealed that he had taken Lumumba’s golden tooth.
Over six decades after it was separated from its owner, Lumumba’s tooth has been returned to his family during a ceremony in Brussels.
The police commissioner appeared in a documentary in 1999 where he described taking body parts from corpses as a “type of hunting trophy”.
Lumumba’s daughter Juliana questioned what kind of human would take the body parts of the victims they kill.
“What amount of hatred must you have to do that?” she asked.
“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.
Lumumba, an advocate for the freedom of the Democratic Republic of Congo, was elected prime minister of the African nation at the age of 34.
He headed to Belgium for the handover of power where he gave an unscheduled speech on the violence the people of the DRC had suffered.
The speech, while applauded by the crowd, is still seen as the event where Lumumba signed his own death warrant.
Lumumba’s journey from prime minister to murder victim took less than seven months.
Although his body parts were destroyed to remove all evidence, the golden tooth will be transported around the DRC before being buried in the capital city of Kinshasa.
Image source: @DW
