The relic was restored after King Philip of Belgium expressed “deep regret” this month for his country’s abuses in its former African colony, Congo, 75 times the size of Belgium. After a private ceremony attended by relatives of Lumuba, during which the federal prosecutor handed over a case containing the golden tooth, the Belgian Prime Minister and Congolese officials were also to speak to the family. After his assassination in 1961, Lumuba’s body was dismembered and dissolved with acid in an apparent attempt to prevent any tomb from becoming a place of worship. The tooth was confiscated by Belgian officials decades later by the daughter of a police commissioner who said she took it after overseeing the destruction of Lumuba’s body. Two years ago, the federal prosecutor’s office said there was no absolute certainty that the returned tooth belonged to Lumuba, as no DNA test could be performed. Lumuba remains for many in the Democratic Republic of Congo a symbol of what the country could have become after independence. Instead, it sank into decades of dictatorship that drained its vast mineral wealth. After pushing for an end to colonial rule, Lumuba became the first prime minister of the newly independent country in 1960. But historians say that when he asked the Soviet Union for help to quell a separatist movement in the mineral-rich Katanga region during Cold War, fell out of favor with Belgium and the US. When dictator Mobutu Sese Seko came to power in a military coup that year, Western powers did little to intervene as Lumumba was arrested and imprisoned. His assassination by separatists in January 1961 finally paved the way for Mobutu to rule the country, which he later renamed Zaire, for decades until his death in 1997. Although Lumuba’s killers were Congolese, there are still questions about how complicit Belgium and the United States may have been in his death because of his communist ties. A Belgian parliamentary inquiry later found that the government was “morally responsible” for Lumuba’s death. A U.S. Senate committee found in 1975 that the CIA had devised a separate failed plot to assassinate the Congolese leader. Two years ago, the 60th anniversary of Congo’s independence rekindled calls for Lumuba’s soul to rest. Protesters gathered outside the Belgian embassy in Kinshasa demanding the restoration of his remains along with cultural artifacts taken during colonial rule. In Belgium, international anti-racism protests following the death of George Floyd in the United States gave new impetus to activists fighting to remove the monuments to King Leopold II. Subscribe to the First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am Leopold plundered the Congo during his reign in 1865-1909 and forced many of its inhabitants into slavery to extract resources for their own gain. In 1908 he handed it over to the Belgian state, which continued to rule the colony until its independence. In the midst of the actions of the Black Lives Matter, the protesters removed the busts of the former monarch who was responsible for the death of millions of Africans and Philippe later expressed his regret for the violence perpetrated by the country. None of his predecessors had reached the point of conveying remorse.
