DRC Buries Last Remains Of Patrice Lumumba: A Tooth 61 Years After Brutal Murder

The New Diplomat
Writer

Ad

Why Wike Should Resign or Be Sacked: A Call to Organized Civil Society in Nigeria to Uphold Anti-corruption Standards with Consistency, By Frank Tietie

By Frank Tietie The revelations by Nigerian social crusader, investigative journalist, and activist Omoyele Sowore regarding the current Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyiesome Wike, are serious and warrant the attention of all Nigerians who care about the integrity of the country. Sowore has alleged that Wike laundered funds and concealed the purchase of…

Dangote Refinery Slams PENGASSAN, Describes Order as ‘Economic Sabotage’

By Abiola Olawale In an escalating labor showdown, the Dangote Petroleum Refinery has fired back at the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN), criticising the latter’s order on Saturday. This is as the refinery owned by Africa’s richest person, Alhaji Aliko Dangote described PENGASSAN's order to cut crude oil and gas…

Intimate Affairs: ‘I don’t want a mother-in-law,’ By Funke Egbemode

By Funke Egbemode Tola doesn’t wish anybody dead. She just doesn’t want to go through what her mother went through in the hands of her grandmother. She had been told that she might just be lucky and end up with a husband with a kind mother. But she’s scared, I believe, irredeemably, by the trauma…

Ad

With News Agencies 

The family of Democratic Republic of Congo’s murdered independence hero Patrice Lumumba has buried his only known remains, a tooth, in the capital Kinshasa, 61 years after his death at the hands of Belgian-backed secessionist rebels.

Hundreds gathered in a vast square for the occasion on Thursday, waving flags and looking upon a large photo of Lumumba, with his trademark horn-rimmed glasses and side-swept hair, framed by white flowers.

Lumumba was killed by a firing squad on January 16, 1961, in the southeastern province of Katanga after being deposed as prime minister the previous year, all within months of DRC’s independence from Belgium.

A banner with the words “Many thanks, National Hero” was suspended over the crowd, which included the president of neighbouring Congo Republic, Denis Sassou Nguesso, Belgium’s foreign minister and several African ambassadors.

“Finally, the Congolese people can have the honour of offering a burial to their illustrious prime minister,” President Felix Tshisekedi said. “We are ending … mourning we started 61 years ago.”

The funeral was held on the 62nd anniversary of the central African country’s independence. On that day, Lumumba had given a fiery speech lambasting Belgium’s 75-year colonisation of Congo.

By some estimates, killings, famine and disease killed up to 10 million Congolese during the first 23 years of Belgium’s rule from 1885 to 1960, when King Leopold II ruled the Congo Free State as a personal fiefdom. Villages that missed rubber collection quotas were notoriously made to provide severed hands instead.

While Belgium’s King Phillipe, who visited the country for the first time this month, has admitted that Belgian colonial rule was unjustifiable and racist, he stopped short of an apology.

DRC’s first democratically elected prime minister, Lumumba alarmed the West with overtures to Moscow at the height of the Cold War.

His government lasted just three months before he was overthrown and assassinated. Supporters and some historians have accused the CIA of involvement.

A Belgian parliamentary investigation into Lumumba’s killing concluded in 2002 that Belgium was “morally responsible” for his death.

The body was never found. His only remaining tooth was reportedly taken by a Belgian policeman, Gerard Soete, who claimed to have dissolved much of the corpse in acid and burned the rest.

Belgium handed over the tooth to Lumumba’s family on June 20.

“Your return home, the honours you are receiving here are a page of the history you continue to write,” one of his grandaughters said in a letter to Lumumba that she read at the funeral. “With you, today, Africa is writing its own history,” she said.

Ad

Unlocking Opportunities in the Gulf of Guinea during UNGA80
X whatsapp