The battle for Patrice Lumumba’s tooth – how the family of Congo’s first leader finally secured his remains

A gold-capped tooth is all that remains of Patrice Lumumba, the African freedom fighter who became Congo’s first prime minister when it won its independence from Belgium in 1960. 

It was wrenched from his skull after he was executed in January 1961 and taken to Belgium as a human trophy. The rest of his body was cut up and dissolved in acid. 

Now, after almost 60 years, the tooth is finally heading home. A Belgian judge has ordered it to be sent back to Mr Lumumba’s family in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where it can be laid to rest.

The return of the tooth is an uncomfortable reminder for Belgians about a horrendous episode in their history with the Congo. Mr Lumumba, a charismatic anti-colonialist, was brutally murdered in the aftermath of Congo’s independence, with Belgium’s security services, the CIA and even MI6 plotting his downfall. As Belgium comes to terms with its appalling legacy in Congo, Mr Lumumba stands out as a defiant voice against imperial oppression.  

The court decision last Thursday came in response to a letter written in June by his daughter, Juliana Lumumba, to Belgium’s King Philippe to explain how her father was, “a hero without a grave. A dead person without a funeral. A body without bones”. 

She hailed the tooth’s return, “because at last, 60 years after his death, the mortal remains of my father, who died for his country and its independence and for the dignity of black people, will return to the land of his ancestors”.

Mr Lumumba, a former travelling beer salesman and postal clerk was a co-founder in October 1958 of the Congolese National Movement (MNC). He was in prison in January 1960 when the Belgian government convened a round table conference in Brussels to discuss independence. Mr Lumumba was released and flown to Brussels. As independence approached, the MNC won the first free elections and he was named as prime minister. He was just 35.

Mr Lumumba was courageous, intelligent and passionate, but inexperienced. He expressed the idealism of self-determination and used his platform to powerful effect. Speaking at Congo’s 30 June 1960 independence ceremony next to Belgium’s then-King Baudouin, he lashed out at the former colonial masters for forcing “humiliating slavery” on the Congolese people. 

“No Congolese will be able to forget that independence was won in a struggle of blood, fire and tears,” he declared. His speech fired Africans with a sense of indignation at their colonial past.  

But Mr Lumumba’s time in power was short, just 10 weeks. 

Within days of independence, the country plunged into crisis as the army mutinied and the mineral-rich Katanga province attempted to break away. Belgium sent in troops to protect its nationals and United Nations peacekeeping forces arrived to stop them from reasserting Belgian rule. 

The UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld himself would die later in 1961 in a plane crash as he tried to broker peace talks between the Congo troops and Katanga forces – with the CIA, MI6 and the Belgians again suspected as playing a part in his death.

Mr Lumumba approached the US for help, but the president, Dwight Eisenhower, refused, fearing a Congolese Castro. When he then turned to the Soviet Union, he sealed his fate: Congo was seen as a vital cog in the Cold War, and the west would not allow it to fall under Moscow’s sway. 

By September, CIA-backed army chief Joseph-Désiré Mobutu launched a coup d’état: he would lead a brutal, corrupt dictatorship for the next three decades that would run the country into the ground. Even today, it is still consumed by ethnic conflicts.  

Mr Lumumba was placed under house arrest in September 1960 and then sent in January 1961 to Katanga, where Mr Mobutu knew the rebels would kill him; he was shot, along with two associates, and thrown in a shallow grave. A day later, a Belgian colonial policeman Gérard Soete dug up the bodies in an apparent attempt to keep any grave from becoming a pilgrimage site. 

With his brother’s help, and fortified with alcohol, Mr Soete sawed up the corpses and dissolved them in 200 litres of sulphuric acid. Before his death in 2000, Mr Soete would boast about taking two of Lumumba’s teeth, his wedding ring, a fingerbone and bullets from the body.  

Belgian authorities confiscated the tooth from Mr Soete’s daughter in 2016 as part of the federal prosecutor's investigation into Lumumba's murder – the other relics were not found. 

The tooth would normally have been tested for DNA, but the investigating judge said that might destroy Mr Lumumba’s last remaining body part, and he decided that its emotional value would take precedence over the ongoing inquiry.  

Jean Omasombo, a historian working at Belgium’s Royal Museum of Central Africa and author of several books about Congo and Lumumba, says the killing was Belgium’s attempt to continue its effective colonialisation even after independence. 

“They made sure the country was ungovernable for Lumumba: it was emptied out economically, and he was not allowed to control the army,” Mr Omasombo says. “Belgium then tried to erase him physically and symbolically.”

Belgium has slowly tried to make amends. A 2001 Belgian parliamentary enquiry found that Belgian officials were morally responsible for his death - the government formally apologised for the murder in 2002. And in 2018, Brussels renamed a small plaza the Square Patrice Lumumba, next to the Matonge neighbourhood, home to a large Congolese diaspora.  

Earlier this year, MPs approved a proposal to set up a parliamentary commission to examine Belgium’s colonial past, likened to South Africa’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission that was set up after the end of the apartheid regime.

In June, on the 60th anniversary of the country’s independence, King Philippe expressed his “deepest regret” for the wounds of the past and the “acts of violence and cruelty committed” under Belgian occupation – particularly in the 19th century when it was the personal possession of former King Leopold II. Millions of Africans were killed, enslaved or died of disease as the king plundered its vast wealth in ivory and wild rubber. Leopold’s legacy has resurfaced in recent months as the Black Lives Matters protesters demanded that Belgium remove monuments to the colonial era and rename the many streets and squares that bear his name.  

As for Mr Lumumba, his death created a myth of the lion of the Congo and the hero of Africa’s independence struggle. US civil rights activist Malcolm X dubbed him “the greatest Black man who ever walked the African continent”. A statue of him stands in the middle of the Lumumba Boulevard between Kinshasa's airport and city centre. Even today, Congolese see him a symbol of what the country could have been.

Writer Adam Hochschild, whose seminal 1999 bestseller King Leopold’s Ghost lifted the lid on Belgium’s colonial atrocities, says Lumumba’s vision of economic and political independence for the former colonies in Africa was a huge threat to corporations in the United States, Belgium, and other European countries. 

He certainly articulated a dream of economic independence and dignity for Africa that caught the imagination of millions of people,” he says. “This is what made him, in Western eyes, so dangerous.” Mr Lumumba’s sordid killing, Mr Hochschild says, is a reminder of how Belgium not only wanted him dead, but all traces of his remains destroyed or hidden. 

“They feared his being regarded as a martyr – which of course turned out to be the case,” he says.