PLANS TO return the only remains of freedom fighter hero Patrice Lumumba back to Congo have been postponed again by Belgium, on the 61st anniversary of his murder. 

The Congolese presidency recently announced that Belgium’s restitution ceremony for the former prime minister and independence hero has now been pushed back until June 2022, apparently due to Covid-19.

This is the second time the plans have been delayed. 

In 1960, Lumumba led Congo, now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to independence from Belgium and became the country’s first democratically elected prime minister 

By January 1961, he had been overthrown and jailed because of a plot spearheaded by the United States and Belgium.

He was executed on 17 January 1961 by firing squad and his body was later dissolved in acid. 

Lumumba’s only remains – a tooth – has been in Belgium ever since. 

Lumumba lead the independence struggle that overthrew the brutal colonial Belgian rule. It is estimated that King Leopold II of Belgium oversaw the deaths of over ten million Congolese.

In 2013, a member of the House of Lords, Lord Lea, wrote to the London Review of Books saying that shortly before she died, fellow peer and former MI6 officer Daphne Park told him Britain had been involved in the murder.

In an open letter to the king of Belgium, Juliana Lumumba, daughter of the pan-African leader demanded her father’s tooth be returned to her family and homeland for a proper burial. 

In the letter, she wrote: “If anthropologists say that the concern for burial and the funeral ritual are essential human characteristics, each year the DRC, Africa, and the world pay homage to Patrice Emery Lumumba as an unburied hero. The years pass, and our father remains a dead man without a funeral oration, a corpse without bones.

“In our culture like in yours, respect for the human person extends beyond physical death, through the care that is devoted to the bodies of the deceased and the importance attached to funeral ritual, the final farewell.

“But why, after his terrible murder, have Lumumba’s remains been condemned to remain a soul forever wandering, without a grave to shelter his eternal rest?”

Ms Lumumba added: “Throughout our mother’s life, fifty-three years of it wearing mourning clothes, she fought to give a final resting place to her tender husband. On December 23, 2014, she herself left us, a woman broken-hearted, not having been able to fulfil her duty as a widow. The height of our sorrow is that we know that our mother is not resting in peace.

“For my brothers and I, our responsibility as children — our duty as descendants, now that we have ourselves become mother and fathers — is to pay homage to our father, to our progenitor, by offering him a grave worthy of the precious blood that ties us to him, running through our veins.”

“We, the children of Patrice Emery Lumumba, do not want to leave this painful task to our children, who never knew their grandfather,” she added.

In 2000, a Belgian police commissioner, Gérard Soete, claimed to have brutally removed the tooth from Lumumba’s body before dissolving it in sulfuric acid. 

Soete also described cutting and dissolving the bodies of two of Lumumba’s closest friends, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito, who were killed at the same time as the Congolese hero. 

During a documentary shown on German TV channel ARD in 2000, Soete showed the tooth – which he had kept for almost 40 years. 

The Belgian justice system announced in September 2020 that they had agreed to return the tooth to Lumumba’s family and it was seized from Soete’s daughter. 

The original hand over of the remains was scheduled to take place on 21 June 2021 to commemorate the 60^th anniversary of the DRC’s independence. 

But were delayed due to Covid-19 cases rising “exponentially”, according to DRC President Tshisekedi. 

The decision to delay the return of Lumumba’s remains for a second time has angered many historians and activists and there has been growing calls to return human remains of Africans killed during the colonial era for many years.

In 2015, former Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, demanded London’s Natural History Museum return the skulls of several resistance fighters who were killed by British colonisers. 

At the time, president Mugabe said: “Surely, keeping decapitated heads as war trophies, in this day and age, in a national history museum, must rank among the highest forms of racist moral decadence, sadism and human insensitivity.”

Last year, the #Bringbackourbones campaign was launched by a group of Zimbabweans and others in the African diaspora, demanding the return of the skulls, with protests taking place across the southern African country. 

In 2011, the skulls of 20 people from Namibia, who died under colonial rule were returned back to the southwest African country. 

The 20 skulls had been taken by German scientists who performed a variety of experiments on the remains.

Following a parliamentary commission in 2001, Belgium acknowledged its ‘moral responsibility’ in Lumumba’s cruel and cold-blooded death.

However, no one has ever been charged for the barbaric murder.

A spokesperson for the Natural History Museum said: “We have the remains of eleven individuals from Zimbabwe but after extensive research have found no evidence to suggest that they are the remains of the freedom fighters Mugabe referred to – nor have we found any evidence that any of these individuals have ever been held by the Museum.

“We have shared all the information we have with the authorities in Zimbabwe and are continuing discussions with the Zimbabwean government and hope to host a delegation in 2022 to discuss the repatriation of the remains we do hold.”