By: Rpf Gakwerere
They killed Patrice Lumumba, sawed his body into pieces, dissolved it in sulfuric acid, then kept his tooth as a souvenir. 60 years later, his daughter has had to go to court to have her father’s tooth returned.
What kind of people are these? It is both an admission of guilt and an expression of just how horrific colonialism was. Take our land, obliterate our culture and rich history, kill our leaders, destroy our religion and ways of living, dehumanise, take our heads, arms, hearts, teeth, art, minerals back to Europe as souvenirs.
Colonialism was terrorism – colonialism is just a sanitised term, but in real concept analysis, colonialism was first class brutal terrorism.
“…let us not forget that we sometimes had leaders who gave their all to the struggle. Their blood, their lives, their spirit, their souls. Let us not forget what happened to them. Let us keep their visions alive..” Dr. Foluke Adebisi.
A Belgian judge recently said that a tooth taken from the remains of the Congo’s first elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, should be returned to his family almost 60 years after his assassination by rebels overseen by Belgian officers.
The tooth had been seized from a Belgian policeman who admitted taking it while helping to dispose of Lumumba’s body after the politician was murdered in 1961. The Belgian government of the time, the CIA and MI6 have also been implicated.
Eric Van Duyse, spokesman for the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office, said the tooth would be returned to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a former Belgian colony.
R.I.P Patrice Lumumba
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/10/judge-orders-return-of-tooth-said-to-be-from-assassinated-congolese-icon