2023-08-07 00:20:22
His story has revealed, for everyone, the deep link between independence, unity and the fight against trusts.
jean paul Sartre
A little over a year ago, on June 30, 2022, in an international-class ceremony —which took place in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo—, a tooth was buried. The act to which I refer —headed by the president of the country and other high-ranking figures— was preceded by a barrage of news that, months before, prepared the ground for public opinion for what would happen that day.
In this way, the occasion was —at the same time— spectacular and unusual because, after all, why bury a tooth? What degree of relevance must a person deserve for a small piece of his body to mobilize such a level of attention? How to read the accounts of such an occasion? How far to take the analysis?
II
Going back in time leads us to the various moments in which —based on the testimonies of Gerard Soete— the news of this dental piece broke out. Soete, a Belgian official who in 1961 was commissioned to organize the police in Katanga, a secessionist region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, made public the news that he had a tooth extracted from the body of Congolese leader Patricio Lumumba.
In an interview for the French news agency AFP, the former official not only confessed to having been an eyewitness to the murder of the former Prime Minister of the country, Patricio Lumumba (executed together with his collaborators Joseph Okito, First Vice-president of the Senate, and Maurice Mpolo , Minister of Youth and Sports), but also exposed his role as the person in charge of dismembering the corpse and making it disappear in a tank of acid.
The testimony exposes the picture of that night in which the colonial employee was in charge of cutting the bodies with a pair of electric saws (it is interesting that he remembered that the body of Lumumba cost him more work, cut into 34 portions), he submerged them in acid and he scattered, the next day, the few bone fragments that survived the destructive force of the chemical reaction.
The intention that justified the act was to prevent the existence of the body of the assassinated politician from being useful for the mobilization of his followers; the non-existence of the body should contribute to the disarticulation of any resistance.
At that time, both as a war trophy and as proof (of having been there and carried out the order) Soete kept two of Lumumba’s teeth, one of which is said to have been damaged during extraction. Shortly after, in the documentary titled A colonial-style death. The murder of Patricio Lumumbathe former policeman recounts the story, this time before the camera and with smiles included, of how he took care of the disappearance of the bodies.
For researcher Ludo De De Witte, author of the book The assassination of Lumumba: “one of the most important political assassinations of the 20th century”.
Although the number of political crimes of the last century (and even of this current one) makes up a list that is shocking, the particularity of the case was —first of all— that it involved the elected Prime Minister of a country that, at the same time time, gained its independence. Second, because he turned out to be a great political figure who was deposed, imprisoned, unprotected, tortured, executed, and denigrated with the participation, support, and/or complicity (express or tacit) of representatives of foreign governments or international organizations. Third, due to the fact that he was already a key personality in the pan-Africanism of the time and for occupying a place of high relevance, responsibility, impact and possibilities to generate or accelerate changes in one of the fundamental countries for the continent, the anti-colonial struggles and , in general, anti-imperialist thought and action.
Decades will pass until in 2016 the Belgian police search the house of Soete (who died in 2000) and find that tooth that the police officer kept as his personal war trophy, later inherited by his daughter.
On a closer date, on June 20, 2022, at an official ceremony in Brussels, the capital of Belgium, Alexander de Croo, Prime Minister of the former metropolis, declared that: “”The Belgian government unequivocally denounces colonization, as a system of governance and ideology”. At the ceremony, attended by De Croo, in addition to the family of Lumumba, the Congolese Prime Minister, he officially apologized and delivered the coffin to Lumumba’s children, which was then taken to the embassy of the Democratic Republic of Congo. There, after a pilgrimage of several days so that the Congolese people could pay tribute to the assassinated leader, the remains of Lumumba are buried in Kinshasa on June 30, 2022.
III
Is it a closure, a term, or perhaps the beginning of something that we have not yet imagined, the possibility of a radical transformation? The discussion in this regard is abundant, because how to “close” colonial histories without accompanying the beginning gesture contained in the act of reparation? How can we understand that a history of violence, discrimination, exploitation and looting ends if there is no general moment dedicated to repair at any point? Not partial cure, but equalizing repair.
If something makes the story even more incomplete, it is that, although in the words pronounced during the delivery ceremony of the rest, Prime Minister De Croo recognized the “moral responsibility” of Belgium in the death of Lumumba and King Felipe “the most deep regret for the wounds of the past”, this is not binding in the sense that it does not imply the opening of a legal process that identifies criminal responsibility leading to punishment, nor does it imply the obligation to offer reparations.
IV
Among the many vectors for the assassination of Lumumba, one, habitually repeated, derives from the speech delivered by the new Congolese prime minister, on June 30, 1960, on the occasion of the declaration of independence and just after the words of the then king Belgian Baudouin and Joseph Kasa-vubu, Congolese president. The speech requested the disinterested collaboration of the former metropolis with words warning that the nation that was inaugurating its independence was going to seek change with the support not only of, as expressed in the following quote: “our tremendous strength and our immense wealth , but also in the help of many foreign countries whose collaboration we will always accept if it is sincere and does not seek to force any type of policy on us.”
This was to be possible because Belgium had finally recognized “in which direction history was moving”; a Belgium prepared to “offer us its help and friendship”, in a contractual relationship between two “equal and independent” countries that would benefit both. The following fragment exemplifies the fusion of hope and memory, pain and the possibility of change in a colonial situation:
“Could we forget that we knew exhausting work in exchange for wages that did not allow us to satisfy our hunger, dress and live with dignity, educate our children as loved ones? We have been victims of ridicule, insults, whipping, and we had to suffer morning, noon and night because we were “black”. Who will forget that the black was called the first name, not because he was considered a friend, but because the honorable “you” was reserved only for whites?
We have seen our lands looted under the terms of what was supposedly the law of the land, but it only constituted the recognition of the rights of the strongest. We have learned how the law was completely different for blacks and whites, accommodating for the former, cruel and inhumane towards the latter.”
V
In light of what happened, of the justice that still awaits and of the struggles – to achieve full and authentic control of their economic resources – of those countries that were colonies, how terrible and how sad the line in which Lawrence Devlin (the head of the CIA station in Kinshasa at the time), referring to Lumumba, communicated to his superior, Allen Dulles, his fear that there was little time to “avoid another Cuba”!
At the same time, what a powerful poetic/political image offered by Jean Paul Sartre at the end of the essay he dedicates to Fanon and Lumumba —in the volume SituationsV—and where also, although with an absolutely opposite intention, there is a mixture between the paths of anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, sovereignty and independence opened by Lumumba and Fidel Castro:
“The capitalist concentration will progressively defeat the feudalities, it will unify the exploited, all the conditions of Castroism will be met. But Cubans honor the memory of Martí, who died at the end of the last century without seeing Cuba’s victory over Spain or the domination of the Island by United States imperialism. And the Congolese Castro, in a few years, if it wants to teach its people that unity can be won, it will remember its first martyr, Lumumba.”
After this beautiful construction of a meeting point -for all the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist processes- that Sartre proposes to us, I choose to end with a couple of fragments that I take from the last letter that Patricio Lumumba wrote to his wife Pauline:
“We are not alone. Africa, Asia and the free and liberated peoples in every corner of the globe will forever be on the side of the millions of Congolese who will not give up the fight until the day there are no more colonizers and their mercenaries in our country. I want to tell my children, whom I am leaving behind and may never see again, that the future of the Congo is beautiful and that their country expects them, as it expects every Congolese, to fulfill the sacred task of rebuilding our independence, our sovereignty; because without justice there is no dignity and without independence there are no free men.”
The day will come when history will speak. But it will not be the history that is taught in the United Nations, Washington, Paris or Brussels; rather, it will be the history taught in countries that have freed themselves from colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history and both in the north and in the south of the Sahara it will be a history full of glory and dignity.”
What to say other than to say thank you for so much possibility?
See you there.
Bibliography (minimum)
DeWitte, Ludo. The assassination of Lumumba. London: Verso, 2001.
Gerard, Emmanuel y Kuklick, Bruce. Death in the Congo. Murdering Patrice Lumumba Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Lumumba Speaks. The speeches and writings of Patrice Lumumba,1958-1961. Boston-Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1972.
Return-Outdoor, Georges. Patrice Lumumba. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2014.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. The political thought of Patricio Lumumba. In: Critical Thought, Havana, nº 2-3, March-April 1967.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Situations, V. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.
(Cover image: afroféminas.com)
#meet #Lumumba #Cubaperiodistas