Patrice Lumumba under arrest
Patrice Lumumba was the first prime minister of the Republic of the Congo and a pioneer of African unity. He was murdered on January 17, 1961,
by the Belgian government after he fought for independence.
Democratically elected to lead the Mouvement National
Congolais, the party he founded in 1958, Lumumba was at the center of the
country’s growing popular defiance of the colonial rule of oppression imposed
by Belgium.
In June 1960, when independence was finally won, his
unscheduled speech at the official ceremonies in Kinshasa received a standing
ovation and made him a hero to millions.
A threat always to those who sought to maintain a covert
imperialist hand over the country, within months, he became a victim of an
insidious plot. He was arrested and subsequently tortured and executed.
Ludo De Witte’s book, ‘The Assassination of Lumumba,’
unravels the appalling mass of lies, hypocrisy, and betrayals that have
surrounded accounts of the assassination since its perpetration.
Drawing on a vast array of official sources and
personal testimony from many individuals in the Congo at the time, Ludo De Witte
reveals a network of complicity that extends from the Belgian government to the CIA.
Chilling official memos that detail ‘liquidation’ and
‘threats to national interests’ are analyzed alongside macabre tales of the
destruction of evidence, putting Patrice Lumumba’s personal strength and his
dignified quest for African unity in stark contrast with one of the murkiest
episodes in twentieth-century politics.
The disposal of the body of Patrice Lumumba
The bodies of Lumumba, Mpolo, and Okito were not to stay in
their new grave in Kasenga for long. A definitive solution was planned over the
next two days.
Early in the afternoon of January 21, two Europeans in
uniform and a few Black assistants left for Kasenga in a lorry belonging to the
public works department, containing road signs, geometrical instruments, two
demijohns filled with sulphuric acid, an empty 200-liter petrol barrel, and a
hacksaw.
According to Brassinne, all the equipment was provided by
the public works department, and Verscheure and Belina also confirmed that the
sulphuric acid came from the Union Miniere.
On their arrival, they unloaded the road signs and
theodolite to make passers-by think that they were doing a land survey. But
they couldn’t find the grave and had to stop searching at nightfall.
Not until the evening of the next day did they find the
grave and start their lugubrious task. The corpses were dug up, cut into pieces
with knives and a hacksaw, and then thrown into the barrel of sulfuric acid.
The operation took hours and ended the next morning, on
January 23. At first, the two Belgians dismembering the bodies wore masks over
their mouths, but took them off when they became uncomfortable.
Their only protection against the stench was whiskey, so
according to Brassinne, they got drunk. One of the Black assistants spilled the
acid on his foot and burned him badly.
After this gruesome task, they discovered that they didn’t
have enough acid and only the bodies weren’t completely consumed. According to
Verscheure, the skulls were ground up, and the bones and teeth (the body parts
neither acid nor fire could destroy) were scattered on the way back.
The same occurred with the ashes. Nothing was left of the
three nationalist leaders. From 1961 till now, their remains, even the most
minute traces of them were found.
Part of Lumumba’s body was kept as a souvenir.
However, from an article published by the Daily Maverick, it
is revealed that the Belgian magazine Humo published an interview with
Godelieve Soete, one of the daughters of Gerard Soete, who died in 2000, who
had claimed that he had disposed of his macabre “trophies” (the body parts of
Patrice Lumumba) in the sea.
However, during the interview, his daughter presented the
magazine’s photographer and reporters with a small box that contained a
gold-wrapped molar that had been ripped from Lumumba’s jaw before his body was
disposed of.
While the tooth was being photographed for the first time, the journalists, Jan Antonissen en Hanne Van Tendeloo, asked Soete’s daughter
whether seeing it affected her in any way.
"Mais non, ‘Ce n’était quand-même pas un homme sérieux’," she replied. (Loosely translated: “But no, he was a man of no importance.”).
While Godelieve remembers her father as a brutal
disciplinarian and recounts the effect the gruesome task had had on his psyche
and her family, there is little insight into the wide consequences not only of
her father’s deeds but of the devastating Belgian colonial rule so vividly
captured in Adam Hochschild’s best-selling “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of
Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa.”
Her disturbing lack of empathy and understanding and
insistence that HER father and HER family were actually the victims speaks
volumes about the perverse mindset of those who have never had to face or
account for their role in a brutal history.
“My father never received any recognition or thanks for the
work he did,” Godelieve told Humo.
When the journalists ask who it was she expected would
afford her father the “recognition", Godelieve replies that after the 2001
parliamentary commission, Belgium’s then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Louis
Michel, had apologized to Lumumba’s family on behalf of the country.
“Why did the family of Lumumba receive an apology, but we did
not? They lost their brother and father, but we also lost someone, my father.
Why doesn’t Belgium apologize for the inhuman instruction they gave him?”
She said after De Witte exposed the assassination in
1999, she wondered why her father had “reopened the wounds.”
It’s hard to understand why a continent called Africa will
pass through such horrible experiences, all because of the wealth the continent
has. If Europe and America want to steal from Africa, they can do so, but they
mustn’t kill the leaders and Africans. From slavery to colonial brutality, apartheid, medical crimes, AIDS, and Ebola. What comes next?
The mortal remains of Patrice Lumumba must be returned to his family so that a mourning period that has endured for 55
years can begin to find some sort of closure and so that the last resting place
of this African icon can become a place of remembrance of a man who gave his
life to bring real independence to his country and continent.”