15 things to know about murdered African hero, Patrice Lumumba

Sixty-one years after Belgian authorities have finally returned a tooth belonging to freedom fighter, Patrice Lumumba, who was murdered gruesomely by separatists and Belgian mercenaries in 1961, as an anti-colonial hero.
Below are 15 things to know about assassinated Congolese independence hero, Patrice Lumumba.

Patrice Lumumba was born on July 3, 1925 to Julienne Wamato Lomendja and her husband, François Tolenga Otetshima, a farmer, in Onalua, in the Katakokombe region of the Kasai province of the Belgian Congo.
He was known for being a vocal, precocious young man, regularly pointing out the errors of his teachers before peers, often to their chagrin. His outspoken nature would come to define his life and career.
Lumumba spoke Tetela, French, Lingala, Swahili and Tshiluba.
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. He also became a hero and the face of the struggle against colonialism in Africa.
A fiery critic of Belgium’s rapacious rule, became his country’s first Prime Minister but fell out with the former colonial power and the United States. He was ousted in a coup a few months after taking office.
After Mobutu’s military coup, Lumumba attempted to escape to Stanleyville to join his supporters who had established a new anti-Mobutu rival state called the Free Republic of the Congo but was captured and imprisoned en route by state authorities under Mobutu.

He was handed over to Katangan authorities and executed in the presence of Katangan and Belgian officials and officers.

The execution is thought to have taken place on 17 January 1961 between 21:40 and 21:43 (according to the Belgian report). The bodies were thrown into a shallow grave. The following morning, on orders of Katangan Interior Minister Godefroid Munongo who wanted to make the bodies disappear and thereby prevent a burial site from being created, Belgian Gendarmerie officer Gerard Soete and his team dug up and dismembered the corpses, and dissolved them in sulfuric acid while the bones were grounded and scattered.
But the tooth, gold-capped was kept as a trophy by the Belgian Gendarmerie officer Gerard Soete.
The tooth was eventually seized from the daughter of the policeman, Gerard Soete by Belgian authorities in 2016 after Lumumba’s family filed a complaint.
Belgium, on Monday, handed over the last remains of the slain Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, a tooth, to his family, turning a page on a grim chapter in its colonial past.
Chief prosecutor, Frederic Van Leeuw gave the relatives a small, bright blue box containing the tooth in a televised ceremony, and said the legal action they had taken to receive the relic had delivered “justice”.
The tooth was placed in a casket that was then draped in the flag of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which celebrates Lumumba, who was murdered.
The casket containing the tooth is set to be flown back to the DRC where it will be officially laid to rest at a memorial site.
The country is set to hold three days of “national mourning” from 27 to 30 June to mark the burial ceremony on its 62nd anniversary of independence. Nation

Patrice Lumumba