Patrice Lumumba: the rebel leader who was murdered and dissolved in acid with the help of Belgian authorities

Day and night they came, filing in to pay respects to all that remains of their anti-colonial hero: the Congolese and wider African diaspora of Belgium.

A tooth, encased in a full-sized coffin, lay draped in the flag of the Democratic Republic of the Congo at its Brussels embassy, as Patrice Lumumba finally received funerary honours denied for 61 years.

The horror story began in 1885. King Leopold II seized the Congo as a personal possession. Under the pretence of a humanitarian mission, he forced its inhabitants to extract the natural wealth of the land for his personal enrichment, in a regime of such brutality it was an international scandal at the time.

A 1904 image by missionary Alice Seeley Harris captured a father gazing at the tiny severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter, dismembered as a punishment for him harvesting too little rubber. Its international reach helped turn public opinion.

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Under diplomatic pressure, the colony was transferred from Leopold to the Belgian state in 1908.

It continued to be run for the economic benefit of Belgium, with violent enforcement. Discriminatory laws began to be rolled back only in the 1950s – Congolese people were finally allowed to become individual property owners in 1953 – as a growing middle class led a push for rights and independence.

It was in this environment that Lumumba rose to prominence, as a young anti-imperialist intellectual steeped in the writings of the Enlightenment and the ideas of Pan-Africanism and African nationalism. He founded the Congolese National Movement, dedicated to pursuing independence, and soon became its leader.

He was in prison on charges of inciting a riot when his party swept to a decisive majority in local elections in December 1959. He was released to attend negotiations, and Congolese independence was declared the following month. June national elections returned the 34-year-old as the country’s first prime minister.

In his independence day speech, he recalled that his country’s freedom was not the magnanimous gift of Belgium, but had been won by “a day-to-day fight, an ardent and idealistic fight, a fight in which we were spared neither privation nor suffering, and for which we gave our strength and our blood”.

His time in power was to be short.

The young country faced instability, challenged by regional separatist movements and mutinous factions in the military. In the context of the cold war, western powers were hostile to Lumumba, suspecting him of communist sympathies, wary of his designs on the country’s natural resources, and concerned that he would ally with the Soviet Union. The CIA plotted to kill him.

After just three febrile months in power, Lumumba’s government was overthrown. Mobutu Sese Seko seized power in a military coup, installing a repressive regime that would rule until 1997.

Lumumba was arrested and transferred into the custody of hostile authorities in the breakaway region of Katanga, where he was executed by firing squad.

A Belgian inquiry in 2001 found while Belgian authorities had at times plotted to kill Lumumba, there was no document showing they ultimately ordered his assassination. This week, Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo acknowledged that his country nevertheless held a “moral responsibility” for his murder, as Belgian authorities were involved with his transfer to Katanga in full awareness that he would be killed.

In 2000, a Belgian former colonial police officer, Gérard Soete, made a sensational appearance on German television, revealing that he held Lumumba’s earthly remains.

Soete said he had been ordered to exhume Lumumba’s body, dismember it, and dissolve it in sulphuric acid, to erase any trace of the man who inspired a nation. He had taken Lumumba’s gold-capped tooth as “a type of hunting trophy”, Soete said.

Belgian authorities seized the relic from Soete’s daughter’s house, in 2016, taking it to the Brussels office of the Belgian federal prosecutor.

For decades, Lumumba’s children had not known what happened to their father. In 2020 his daughter, Juliana Lumumba, appealed directly to Belgium’s King Philippe for the belated return of his remains.

“We, the Lumumba family, ask for the just return of the relics of Patrice Emery Lumumba to the ground of his ancestors,” she wrote, describing her father as “a hero without a grave”.

The federal prosecutor formally handed custody of the tooth to the family this week. It will now be flown to Kinshasa, and buried in a memorial site. The DRC has declared three days of national mourning, coinciding with the 62nd anniversary of its independence.

At a press conference, Lumumba’s son Roland said the family could now finally “finish their mourning”.