At 9:40 pm on 17 January 1961, in a forest clearing in Katanga — the mineral-rich southeastern province that Belgium had tried to detach from the newly-independent Congo — Patrice Lumumba was stood before a firing squad. Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister, in office for fewer than three months, was shot dead with the, direct involvement of Belgian officers commanding Katangan secessionist troops. He was 35 years old.
Afterwards, Belgian police commissioner Gerard Soete exhumed his body, dismembered it, and dissolved the remains in sulphuric acid. He kept a gold tooth as what he called “a trophy.” That tooth — all that physically remained of the man who had promised the Congolese people sovereignty over their own soil — was returned to Lumumba’s family in Brussels in June 2022, sixty-one years later. They buried it in Kinshasa on the 62nd anniversary of independence, before hundreds gathered around a photograph of a man who they had never been permitted to mourn. A tooth in a blue velvet box: the sum total of what the West saw fit to return.
