After the birth and the political flight, the killing. The pilgrimage in memory of Patrice Lumumba continues Sunday in Haut-Katanga, in the south-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, place of the tortures and the assassination of the hero of independence.
This January 17, 1961, under a light rain, a firing squad awaited Lumumba, first Prime Minister of the former independent Belgian Congo and two comrades, Joseph Okito, Vice-President of the Senate and Maurice Mpolo, Minister of Youth, tells AFP the historian Guillaume Nkongolo, professor at the University of Lubumbashi.
Deposed, accused in the middle of the Cold War of being communists, the three men had been brought to the locality of Shilatembo, about 50 km from Lubumbashi, the major mining town in the region.
The order was to execute them, at nightfall, at the foot of a tree, after having subjected them to atrocious tortures on the orders of the provincial authorities of Katanga, in secession at that time, with the complicity of men from Belgian hands.
“Before receiving the order to cut up and immerse the three bodies in sulfuric acid, the executioners had buried them and then dug them up the next day,” says Professor Nkongolo. “A foot of Lumumba was sticking out of the ground because it had been buried in a rush,” he said.
“The torture and this triple assassination took place in the presence of three ministers of the secessionist government of Katanga led by Moïse Tshombe,” he continues.
During the solemn return last Monday by Belgium to the DRC of a tooth of Patrice Lumumba, the only remains of his remains, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo renewed the “apologies” of Brussels for the responsibility of certain leaders and officials of the former colonial power in this assassination, the circumstances of which, however, remain shrouded in mystery.
– Last trip –
Even today, Shilatembo keeps the secrets of this harrowing night of the torture of Lumumba and his companions.
After years of abandonment, the site has been transformed into a tourist spot, with a statue of Patrice Lumumba, but also of former President Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who killed dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, religious leader Simon Kimbangu or the prophetess Kimpa Vita, considered the Joan of Arc of the DRC.
There are also busts of a dozen Pan-African leaders, Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela… and the wreckage of an old twin-engine DC2 transformed into a restaurant, supposed to symbolize Lumumba’s last plane trip on January 17, 1961. .
In reality it was a DC4 which had brought him from Léopoldville (Kinshasa) to Elisabethville (Lubumbashi), specifies Professor Nkongolo.
In early 2021, an AFP team found a clay statue of Patrice Lumumba in Shilatembo, an isolated, unfinished, almost abandoned monument, which stood in the middle of nature away from a highway.
On Sunday, the Prime Minister of the DRC Jean-Michel Sama Lukonde must welcome in Lubumbashi the coffin containing the relic of Patrice Lumumba, after the stages of Sankuru (center), his native land and Kisangani (north-east), former political stronghold of the national hero.
In Shilatembo, the Lumumba, Okito and Mpolo families will speak, before an ecumenical religious service and popular tributes with traditional music and Tetela folklore, the tribe of Lumumba.
On Monday, the coffin will head for the capital Kinshasa, where the flags will be lowered like everywhere in the country for a four-day national mourning, before a burial ceremony on June 30, Independence Day. .