Wandile Kasibe
Cape Town - Patrice Emery Lumumba was born in 1925 into a country and continent already ravaged by centuries’ old colonial invasions - the aftermath of the cross-Atlantic slave trade which led to millions of Africans being sold into slavery in the Western metropolis and Europe.
This was a time when Europe was already enriching itself at the expense of millions of African people. The long shadow and unnatural years of colonial rule had already sunk the continent into a never-ending morass of extreme poverty in many parts of the continent, particularly in the Congo.
Frantz Omar Fanon explains this colonial zeitgeist even better when he argues that, the “European opulence is literally scandalous, for it has been founded on slavery, it has been nourished with the blood of slaves and it comes directly from the soil and from the subsoil of that underdeveloped world”.
In this passage, Fanon deposits in us the sense that what is called Europe and the West today is no more than a global criminal syndicate of war criminals who have for centuries built and accumulated their wealth on the backs of Africa and her children. And since Europe and the West have built their intergenerational wealth and empires with the sweat and blood of many generations of Africans through hard labour, and extraction of natural resources, it is only logical to suggest that such wealth belongs to the African people too, thus must be demanded and taken by force where possible.
At the time Lumumba came of age, the entire colonial socio-political eco-system had already set its will against people of his kind and not only this but also set measures in place to devour anything that sought to question its ‘legitimacy’ in the Congo and elsewhere on the continent.
The thunderous sounds of machine guns, whip lashing on the backs of those Africans who refused to labour, extreme poverty, hunger, humiliation and display of shrunken bellies of malnourished children became the order of the day, reducing the continent to what Fanon calls the ‘geography of hunger’.
Based on his active role in the struggles of ordinary people and the ability to articulate the deep-seated sentiments and complex issues that affected his people, we could safely argue that Lumumba became an ipso facto leader even before he became a member of the Congolese National Movement (Mouvement National Congolias; MNC) which later won elections in 1961 and made him Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
As Khokhlov recounts, “Lumumba had the uncanny gift of instantaneously exposing the plots of the enemies of a united Congo, the local and overseas colonialists alike feared his speeches”.
A Pan Africanist par excellence who defended the unity of the African continent from those who sought to cast it into the dark political abyss of a frozen timeline. Lumumba exudes the values of a people bound together by a common grief.
The continent he defended until the last breadth of his life was a geographical terrain about which Western scholars and historiographers had maliciously earmarked as a dark continent with neither movement nor contribution to ‘human civilization’.
To these historiographers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Trevor-Roper, not only was the continent a dark place, but it also was ‘no more than the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes”.
This was the kind of European nonsense and propaganda written about the continent by people who had never set foot on it in the first place.
With the benefit of hindsight, Ivor Wilks submits that, “Professors Hegel and Trevor-Roper stand, in time, at the beginning and end of a period during which most of those concerned with the history of the African continent laboured under the influence of a myth of white supremacy”.
It was against this myth of white supremacy that Lumumba’s voice and political astuteness found perfect expression.
As if given foresight by the God of the African ancestors, he questioned the biases of the law when he said in 1960 that, “we have seen our lands seized in the name of allegedly legal laws, which in fact recognised only that might is right. We have seen that the law was not the same for a white and for a black”.
It would be naïve of us not to suspect that by critically putting the law to scrutiny, Lumumba was in fact responding to the entire generation of Belgians and the generation before them who used their European laws to justify human atrocities and land dispossession they had committed in the Congo.
I have no doubt in my mind that he must have been ruminating about the genocidal acts committed by King Leopold II in the period between 1885 – 1908 and as well as post 1908 after the Belgian government had taken over from Leopold II.
He must have seen and realised that, a country rich in mineral resources and other natural endowments had become a living hell for millions of Congolese people who were the subjects to the colonial violence that was meant to expunge them from the face of the earth. If people of the Congo were the target of this violence, so was Lumumba and the rest of black people as a race.
It is this African colossus, the finest son of the Congo whose gold tooth was extracted from his lifeless body as a trophy and memento on 17 January 1961, after he was fired by a firing squad under Belgian command with two other comrades in arms, then buried and later dug up to be cut into pieces and later dissolved in acid.
The questions that we need to ask are: why would a Belgian officer extract a gold tooth from Lumumba and keep it as his private property in a box?
And what does the return of Lumumba’s tooth say to us about the truth of the darker side of European “modernity”?
Well, the answer to some of these questions lies in Europe’s long entrenched racist tradition of equating black Africans with animals and through a “scientificised” racial dogma drawn from social Darwinism, locating Africans in the lacuna between modern humans and the animal kingdom.
As Bernth Lindfors puts it, “this ‘animality’ of Africans was the feature thought to set them apart from the more rational varieties of the human species”. It is this degrading image of the African that was passed down from one European traveller to another.
To animate this point, Tiyambe Zeleza argues that, “to the Europeans of this period Africa was a laboratory, its animals, flora, and people valuable not in themselves but as specimens that needed to be discovered, collected and classified.”
On a balance of probabilities, it is most likely that the officer who extracted Lumumba’s tooth did so with the same intention following the long European tradition of keeping human remains of their conquered ‘subjects’ as trophies for either public display or private self-gratification and amusement.
I submit that the return of Lumumba’s gold tooth is more than just a question of repatriation but is a cry and clarion call for Africa to lodge a collective lawsuit against former empires and demand a massive return of all human remains and objects of cultural significance of many Africans that are in both private and public collections in European and Western institutions.
It is also an opportune moment for South Africa to join other African countries and call for the return of the heads of the Zulu people that are currently locked in the Museum of Natural History in New York. The five human skeletons of inmates who were stolen from their graves in Port Alfred via the Albany museum in Makanda and then shipped out of the country and currently are at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. How about hundreds of mortal remains of many Africans that are currently in boxes and anthropological shelves in the Samuel George Morton collection at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia?
These are but a few examples of what Europe and the West has of our ancestors’ mortal remains and treasures.
Apology alone is not enough. What we want is historical justice.
* Dr Kasibe is the EFF Western Cape Communications and Liaison Officer who holds a PhD in Sociology from UCT. He writes in his personal capacity.
Cape Times