An hour​ into the galleries of the Africa Museum in Tervuren, on the outskirts of Brussels, you come to Tonga, a startling piece by Nada Tshibwabwa, a Congolese artist and musician. It’s made from recycled mobile phone waste and is roughly the size of a ceremonial mask designed to fit a human head. Tshibwabwa was an artist in residence at the museum in 2022 and his work is now part of the permanent collection. ‘Tonga’ translates from Lingala as ‘build’: he finds his materials by walking the streets of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, or picking through its waste dumps. The east of the country is rich in gold and coltan, with a large informal mining sector, often managed by armed groups who run ore across the borders to Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda. Tshibwabwa’s masks and body costumes, assembled as ‘The Hidden Face of Coltan’, are a parody of early modern plate armour. Their martial character reminds us that the coltan in our phones is a blood mineral, which fuels the wars in the eastern DRC. As visitors reach for their phones to post photos of Tonga, the mask looks back sceptically. What is the real connection, it seems to ask, between the lives of Congolese coltan miners and our smart devices, neither of them known for their longevity? It also makes the point that traditional masks and other artefacts in the museum’s collection were objects of cultural extractivism during the colonial era (and after) – precious assets that have slipped beyond the reach of the DRC.

The museum’s acquisition of works by contemporary Congolese artists is a consequence of the long effort to turn it from a temple of racist kitsch into a modern, ‘decolonised’ institution. Its earliest incarnation dates from the World’s Fair in Brussels in 1897, whose ‘African’ component was staged in the Palace of the Colonies. The palace became the site of a permanent colonial display the following year. Leopold II of Belgium had been running the Congo Free State as a personal fiefdom for more than a decade, issuing franchises to European companies at terrible cost to the Congolese. This arrangement continued until 1908, when ownership of the Congo passed from the king to the Belgian state.

By then the old palace was too small for its burgeoning contents. Leopold had already foreseen this and commissioned Charles Girault, the architect of the Petit Palais in Paris, to design a larger building, which opened in 1910, a year after Leopold’s death. The museum, which remained a monument to his imperial genius, was also a hub of ‘scientific’ endeavour and a repository for anything that the many naturalists, anthropologists, zoologists, marksmen, medics, missionaries and amateur collectors who undertook service in Africa found interesting: stuffed animals, Congolese art and ceremonial objects, samples of precious commodities (timber, ivory, ore), exotic insects and arachnids, venomous snakes pickled in formaldehyde and human remains. The Royal Museum of the Belgian Congo became the Royal Museum of Central Africa after Brussels choked back its fury and granted independence to Congo in 1960. Whatever it was called, it was a place where time stood still, immobilised by vulgar statuary depicting Europe’s magnanimity and its civilising effects on the Congolese. Here and there were tributary likenesses of the monstrous Leopold.

In 2013, the museum closed its doors and embarked on a major redesign. The architectural changes, including a long underground gallery that would transform visitors’ first impressions of the building, must have felt less challenging than the long overdue re-evaluation of the holdings and their presentation. Tervuren was conceived as a showcase for the splendours of Leopold’s vast annex in Africa, but by the 1900s an international movement for ‘Congo reform’ was spreading word of European atrocities, especially those committed against the families of rubber tappers who fell short of their quotas. Leopold’s project had become a scandal, even for staunch imperialists like Joseph Conrad. The transfer of wealth away from the Free State was impressive, as were the rewards for international business and the crown. In The King Incorporated (1963), Neal Ascherson recorded that between 1896 and 1906, Leopold cleared a personal profit in his ‘domaine de la couronne’ of nearly £3 million – perhaps £500 million in today’s money – from his own businesses and franchise fees. It was largely on these takings that the museum was founded, furnished and redeveloped. This history would have to be addressed.

Another pressing issue haunted the museum’s decolonisation project. Within moments of Congo’s independence, Washington and Brussels began destabilising the new leadership, with the acquiescence of the UN’s secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, and fanning a secession in the mineral-rich province of Katanga. The prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was deposed after only three months in power. Four months later he was assassinated by a scratch firing squad overseen by former Belgian colonial police officers. In 2001, a Belgian parliamentary committee concluded that the government of the day ‘bore a moral responsibility’ for Lumumba’s murder. A square in Brussels was named after him in 2018, the year the museum reopened. How was it meant to broach this episode?

Above all, there was the matter of provenance. The new museum was roundly criticised by scholars and the Congolese diaspora in Belgium for the inadequacy of its ‘decolonising’ ambitions. One charge was that too little had been done to explain how the collections were amassed. The museum responded by placing far more emphasis on provenance. An exhibition last year, ReThinking Collections, offered a detailed itinerary of several artefacts and set out Belgium’s current policy on restitution: an object is unlikely to be returned if there is evidence that it changed hands without coercion, but if it can be shown that it was taken without consent – looted, stolen or acquired by deception – there are grounds for handing it back. Between the two extremes lies a grey area: consent without payment, for example, alleged consent, or that equivocal token of exchange, the ‘gift’.

Several of the consultants who played a role in the museum’s reinvention believe that provenance isn’t the central issue when it comes to restitution. The museum ‘will never be able to answer all the questions about the origin of the collections’, according to Sarah Van Beurden, the co-curator of ReThinking Collections and a historian of Central Africa. ‘Other pathways … should be possible. For example, what if a certain type of object no longer exists locally, would that not be just as good a reason for a restitution?’ Anne Wetsi Mpoma, a Congolese gallerist based in Brussels, argues that provenance may even be an obstacle to restitution. It’s easy to imagine an artefact stranded in limbo as scholars rummage in the archive hoping to discover how it made its way to Belgium 150 years ago. Near the end of his life, dogged by criticism of the Free State, Leopold destroyed many papers held at the International African Association, a propaganda organisation created in Brussels in the 1870s to press his claims in central Africa. But there is still a mass of documents to re-examine at the museum – on at least three kilometres of shelving – in the light of current decolonial thinking. Some are slowly being digitised.

The new curation handles the wrecking of Congolese independence frankly but briskly, with a minimum of space, text and visuals. On colonial extraction, it privileges natural history over the history of resource plunder. And despite ReThinking Collections, the permanent exhibition takes a lowkey approach to provenance. Today the museum holds 129,000 cultural objects, 95 per cent of them from Africa and the great majority of those from Congo. Around forty thousand objects and artefacts were shipped out of the country before the start of war in 1914 (among them thousands whose provenance is obscure). A large haul was made between 1911 and 1913, during an expedition in north-eastern Congo sponsored by the museum and led by an ex-military man, Armand Hutereau, to ‘enrich’ the collection.

The field was highly competitive at the time. The Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin had recently wrapped up a similar expedition, while another on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History was still in progress. Hutereau gathered an array of ceramics, statues and musical instruments; he took photographs and captured moving images of dancers and musicians; he recorded hours of music on phonograph cylinders. The tally for the museum was roughly eight thousand pieces, including the recordings. None of this would have happened without the co-operation of a local dignitary, Chief Moroka, who appears to have welcomed Hutereau. But recent interviews with Moroka’s descendants have cast doubt on the serenity of their relationship – and on Hutereau’s modus operandi. Was he merely a capable collector who struck up judicious alliances or was there another side to his character? According to oral tradition, Hutereau was a sasa-moka – a man with a homicidal streak.

Spectacular one-off plunders of the kind the British pulled off in Benin City in 1897 were rare in Congo, but a beautiful statue representing the ancestors of Lusinga Iwa Ng’ombe, a refractory chief, was taken by the Congo Free State officer Émile Storms after a military showdown near Lake Tanganyika in 1884. On his return to Belgium, Storms brought with him not only the statue but the heads of Lusinga and two other defeated Congolese leaders. Lusinga’s skull was acquired by the International African Association during Storms’s lifetime (he died in 1918), transferred to the museum at Tervuren in the 1930s and then to the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in the 1960s, a few years after Lumumba’s assassination.

The clash with Lusinga is glossed in the permanent display, which includes a letter from the secretary of the International African Association to Storms asking for specimen skulls. Dispatching the remains of dead Congolese to Europe for scientific examination was a practice that persisted well into the 20th century. Burial sites were also explored for ‘archaeological’ purposes. In the 1930s and again in the 1950s the archaeologist Maurits Bequaert removed thousands of objects to Brussels, sometimes with proof of Congolese consent. Among them, however, were the grave goods of a distinguished Congolese chief, which Bequaert had pledged – and failed – to return. That breach of promise could in principle open the way for restitution. Many of the objects (chinaware, glass bottles, Toby jugs etc) are of European origin but still of interest to Congolese communities as sacred funerary goods. Well before independence, the boundaries between European and African tastes were becoming porous, as Europeans brought their finery to trading depots and Congolese exchanged or sold their own wares, sometimes proposing facsimiles of originals they were loath to part with. At the time, traditional styles of carving and sculpture were changing to accommodate the tastes of amateur colonial buyers.

Graveyards were also sites for ‘physical anthropologists’ and proponents of race theory. Ferdinand Van de Ginste was a colonial tax collector, whose rounds during the 1930s and 1940s often took him to Feshi, a rural area near the border with Portuguese Angola. He was known locally as ‘Waia-Waia’, or the man on the move. Once they got wind of his arrival, residents of Feshi would sing a warning song to alert their neighbours. He went about with a chicotte, a whip made from hippopotamus hide, which he used liberally on local tax debtors and deficient rubber tappers. In 1945, as the intellectual tide in Europe was turning against race theory and cranial measurement was going out of fashion, Van de Ginste notified his superiors that he meant to excavate human remains in and around Feshi. When the authorisation came through, he enrolled Congolese prisoners to dig up cemeteries, offering them 2.5 Belgian francs (maybe four or five euros today) per skull. The result was a macabre shipment to Tervuren in 1947 of 185 skulls and another forty or so body parts. They were examined by a few anthropologists who remained enthralled by biological evidence of ethnic difference. But the game was up for racialised craniometry by the time the remains from Feshi left Tervuren for the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, along with Lusinga’s skull. By then, Van de Ginste had killed himself.

Amajor obstacle​ to the decolonisation of the Africa Museum is the building itself, the apogee of Leopold’s ambition. Until it’s razed, or transfigured by graffiti, or slathered in paint like several statues of Leopold in Belgium (including one at the museum in 2020), its grandeur situates the ‘decolonial’ conversation in the shadow of the old order. It’s nonetheless a good place to hold it. For the renovation Aimé Mpane, born in the DRC in 1968, sculpted a riposte to the colonial-era statues that stake out the circumference of the grand rotunda – the least repentant part of Girault’s building. The curators had planned to remove them until the Flanders Heritage Agency decreed that they should stay put. Mpane’s New Breath or Burgeoning Congo (2018), a monumental latticed wooden head, heralds a Congolese renaissance after more than two centuries of turmoil. On its own, though, it was no match for its intransigent surroundings and Mpane was commissioned to make a second head, again in openwork wood, that evokes the skull of Lusinga. The two pieces face each other under the dome of the rotunda. Mpane later collaborated with the Belgian artist Jean Pierre Müller on a series of printed veils, now suspended in front of the colonial statuary. The fabrics are translucent, allowing us to glimpse the original offence behind the eloquent reproach. One of the imperial allegories, Belgium Brings Security to the Congo, shows a Belgian matriarch with two hapless Congolese children. Mpane and Müller veiled it with an image of a Belgian paratrooper holding an automatic rifle. When it was first hung, the veil was accompanied by a panel explaining that it depicted a soldier deployed to Stanleyville in 1964 ‘during the crushing of the Simba rebels’: an uprising by Lumumba’s followers three years after his death that spread through nearly half the country. In 2021 the panel was removed after a veterans’ association of Belgian paratroopers challenged its contents in a lawsuit. ‘One more example,’ Van Beurden told me, ‘of how the colonial – and postcolonial – past is still contested in Belgium.’ If the decolonisation of museums can be achieved, it will have to be done on tiptoe, encountering objections with each tentative step.

The most garish sculpture in the old museum showed a Congolese ‘leopard man’ towering over his prostrate Congolese victim. It went on display in 1915 and remained in place for nearly a century. The protagonist wears a spotted hood and tunic; metal claws protrude from his fingers; he is preparing to strike. He is the embodiment of European anxieties about African ‘superstition’: leopard men were a perfect alibi for Belgian colonialism. Members of a secret society known as anioto, they were essentially local militias in the north-east of Congo, enforcing the rules of their communities, laid down by local chieftaincies, and punishing infringements by neighbours. They first came to the attention of Europeans in the early 1890s, during Leopold’s reign. By the time the exoticist sculptor Paul Wissaert had completed The Leopard Man of Stanley Falls, Belgium was creating Potemkin chieftaincies from scratch, which threw the existing order into chaos and led to a rise in anioto killings. Colonial policy was reproducing the very thing it promised to eradicate. None of this would have been apparent to visitors confronting Wissaert’s grisly tableau, though Hergé had a vague sense of it. He scoured the museum for ideas as he began work on one of Tintin’s earliest adventures, serialised in 1930-31 and published the following year in book form as Tintin au Congo. The first edition was considered so toxic that it was rejigged twice to appease its critics, with mixed results. But Hergé’s leopard man, a dim-witted villain, survived the 1970 rewrite – and the attentions of Tintin, who persuades him to betray his Belgian accomplice. Things could have turned out worse: after the first anioto trial in 1920, the colonial administration hanged several of the accused.

The museum’s self-examination predates its five-year redesign. On the eve of the millennium, two books about the imperial past caused a stir in Belgium: Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost (1998) and Ludo De Witte’s L’Assassinat de Lumumba (1999). They were met with queasiness or outright denial. Even so, De Witte’s book was the start of a long reappraisal. In 2000, the artist Toma Muteba Luntumbue was invited to curate a controversial show at Tervuren titled Exit Congo Museum: A Century of Art with or without Papers. It mixed pieces and installations by contemporary artists with rearrangements of precious artefacts in the collections – in one instance as a jumble of objects, seemingly neglected. It’s said that a former curator at the museum, Huguette Van Geluwe, left in tears when she saw the managed disarray. But Luntumbue and his collaborators were pitting the artefacts’ significance for the communities that had lost them against their interest for buccaneer ethnographers and an indifferent Belgian public.

By now renovation looked inevitable, and in 2002 Chéri Samba came up with Réorganisation, an oil painting dramatising the debates that were underway. Wissaert’s leopard man sculpture is balanced on a mattress halfway down the steps of the museum entrance, being hauled away on ropes by a group of resolute Congolese. At the top of the steps a pair of museum staff with ropes of their own are trying to haul it back. Guido Gryseels, who had recently been appointed director, stands with his arms folded, presiding over the tug of war. A panel spells out the issues. Museum staffers: ‘We can’t allow this work to leave the museum; it’s made us what we are today.’ Gryseels: ‘True. And regrettable. But we have to reimagine the museum from the ground up.’ Samba doesn’t need to tell us what the raiding party has in mind. Wissaert’s sculpture has since been consigned to a basement in Tervuren for ‘problematic objects’, corralled with other sidelined colonial-era statues.

On the main floor, we encounter Shadows (2018), a superb installation by Freddy Tsimba. In 1897, more than 260 men, women and children were shipped to Antwerp from the Free State and delivered to Tervuren. It was the year of the World’s Fair and they were expected to recreate the life of the industrious, subjugated race in a human zoo where tens of thousands of European visitors could see them go about their business as if they were still in the Congo. With them came all the accoutrements of village life: rondavels, cooking pots, pirogues, musical instruments. In King Kasaï (2023), an account of his overnight stay in the Africa Museum, the French journalist Christophe Boltanski reminds us that it was a wet, chilly summer. The women were given light cotton tops to cover their breasts while the men wore traditional dress. At night they slept next to the stables; by day they performed for eager crowds – 1.8 million visitors in two months. Some threw them sweets and bananas, until signs had to be put up: ‘Do not give food to the natives. We are seeing to this ourselves.’

It wasn’t long before the climate, and European microbes, took their toll. Seven Congolese in the king’s theme park died of pneumonia, or maybe the flu. We know their names (or pseudonyms) because they were buried in a nearby churchyard: Sambo, Zao, Ekia, Pemba, Kitoukwa, Mibange and Mpeia. Tsimba has used light and shadow to evoke them – and other dead Congolese – in a colonnade where a plaque honouring 1500 Belgians who lost their lives on imperial service for Leopold was unveiled in the 1930s. To browse the list of the king’s ‘first pioneers’ you have to walk slowly down the colonnade with your back to a run of tall windows giving onto a courtyard. On this prodigal expanse of glass Tsimba has printed his own inventory of dead Congolese. On a clear day, as the sun crosses the courtyard, they appear as shadow names, shifting imperceptibly, projected by the light across and alongside the names of the Belgian dead. The result – a kind of mobile palimpsest – feels very much like an act of affective restitution, as the debate about physical returns drags on.

These arguments​ are not new. During the 1870s, the Belgian entrepreneur Alexandre Delcommune seized a powerful wooden sculpture (the term ‘fetish’ has fallen out of use) from Ne Kuko, a chief in Boma region. Ne Kuko contested the theft from the outset and the Africa Museum now cites him as its owner. Renewed calls for restitution were made at the time of independence. In the late 1960s roughly two hundred artefacts were sent from Tervuren to North America for a touring show, organised by the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis; among them was Ne Kuko’s emblematic figure. In 1973, Mobutu Sese Seko, the president of Zaire (as he had renamed the DRC), insisted that he wanted them back. Between 1976 and 1982, once the term ‘restitution’ had been ruled out, more than a hundred pieces were returned to Kinshasa as ‘gifts’. Many are still nominally the property of the museum. Only one of them was on Mobutu’s wish list.

The start of renovations in 2013 coincided with the emergence of Black Lives Matter in the US, following the murder of Trayvon Martin in Florida the previous year. A widespread assault on supremacist statuary followed: in San Francisco (Ulysses Grant among others), Bristol (Edward Colston) and Cape Town (Cecil Rhodes). For BLM and many others, it was clear that the West was defending its own ritual statuary while failing to relinquish sacred artefacts lifted from Africa during the colonial era. Some institutions – perhaps to their relief – have their hands tied. The British Museum is barred from disposing of its holdings – and immunised against restitution – by a law enacted in 1963. In 2005, the High Court ruled against making an exception in the case of four Old Master drawings which had been stolen from their Jewish owner by the Gestapo in 1939.

In 2017, on a visit to Burkina Faso, Emmanuel Macron promised to set the ball rolling for loans and restitutions to Africa. He commissioned a report by Bénédicte Savoy, a French art historian, and Felwine Sarr, a Senegalese economist, ‘on the restitution of African heritage’. Their findings paved the way for the return of 26 objects held in France to the Republic of Benin. All, including three anthropomorphic figures of Dahomean kings, had been seized in the 1890s, after the royal family of Dahomey fled a French expeditionary advance. The journey of these African magi, 130 years later, from the museum at quai Branly in Paris to their destination in present-day Benin is recorded in Mati Diop’s documentary Dahomey (2024). In 2022 the Smithsonian announced the legal transfer of 29 bronzes to Nigeria. At the end of the year, Germany’s foreign minister accompanied 22 pieces to Abuja. Like the Smithsonian trove, they were among the five thousand artefacts, mostly bronzes, seized by the British from Benin City (in present-day Nigeria) and trafficked to international dealers a few years after the palace of Abomey (in present-day Benin) was abandoned to the French. Unlike France, Germany’s first step on the road to restitutions had been to agree a memorandum of transfer to the Nigerian authorities. Roughly a thousand artefacts from Benin City residing in Germany are now considered as loans from the National Commission for Museums and Monuments of Nigeria. (The commission is happy for many to remain there for the time being.) The danger with such a deal is that Germany may want to rest on its decolonial laurels and leave it at that. But Macron’s gesture should be treated with caution too: restitution in France is a piecemeal affair, requiring parliamentary approval on a case-by-case basis. Who knows when the next returns will be approved?

In 2022, the Belgian government provided the DRC with an inventory of 85,000 Congolese objects in state collections, most of them at Tervuren. But Congolese researchers who would like to explore the archives for themselves – and whose interpretations could be at variance with those of their European counterparts – are held back from entry to the EU by stringent visa regimes. Digitisation, meanwhile, remains a slow project. How can a museum be decolonised if the descendants of colonised Congolese can’t gain access to its archives? Until that happens, you’d have to call it a museum of reappraisal, mostly by Europeans, of their colonial past – and face up to the disappointment of many in Africa and Belgium.

‘Restitution is virtue signalling of an irresponsible sort,’ the historian David Abulafia wrote in the Spectator in January, ‘threatening the integrity of great collections by pretending to apologise for past sins.’ Try sounding off about ‘great collections’ in the West to the Beninois students in Diop’s Dahomey, who lament the paucity of the returns – a fraction of France’s holdings – even though they don’t trust the president of Benin with their safe-keeping. Misgivings in Europe about the future of repatriated objects are shared by many African curators. By the mid-1980s a trickle of artefacts that had been returned to Congo at Mobutu’s insistence, including several on loan from Tervuren, began to appear for sale on Western art markets; more turned up in the early 1990s after a wave of unrest across the country. Mobutu was an unreliable keeper of the pieces he claimed to revere. As his regime came apart in the 1990s, so did security at the storage facility of the National Museum of Zaire, located in the grounds of one of his presidential palaces. When Laurent Kabila fought his way to power in 1997 and drove Mobutu into exile, looting became widespread.

‘If our ancestors were good enough to make those objects, we are good enough to look after them,’ the Zimbabwean curator Raphael Chikukwa has argued. ‘You can’t steal my bicycle and say you’ll only return it when I have built a garage.’ The view that European museums are the best guardians of ‘universal’ treasures until there are comparable institutions in Africa was weakened by the discovery in 2023 that more than 1500 objects at the British Museum – a top-of-the-range bike shed – had gone missing. In the meantime, money for museums with modern conservation standards has been flowing to West Africa. The Museum of Black Civilisations in Senegal, which opened in 2018, was built with Chinese financing; the new National Museum of the DRC in Kinshasa, which opened the following year, was funded by South Korea. France, among others, has pledged grants and loans to the Republic of Benin for refurbishment of the royal palace at Abomey and a museum where the pieces from quai Branly, it’s hoped, will eventually be housed. Private foundations – including Mellon, Soros and Ford – have pitched in, along with Germany’s international development agency, for a Museum of West African Art in Nigeria, scheduled to open this year in Benin City. Part of the large complex is already accessible to the public and if it turns out well, MOWAA could be a permanent home for repatriated artefacts from Europe and the US, or a space where they can appear by request. If it doesn’t, Western donors may choose to cut their losses as European development aid is diverted into defence spending, and owners of prized objects will continue to make the most of their assets. ‘In 2007,’ according to the website Auction Daily, ‘Sotheby’s sold a Benin head sculpture for $4.7 million. The winning bidder later purchased another Benin bronze for $13.8 million in a private sale.’

Not everyone calling for repatriation believes that the objects in question should go to African museums. Why not return them directly to the descendants of the original owners? This position, too, keeps Western curators awake at night. In 2023 the bronzes that Germany believed it was returning to the Nigerian government were handed by the contracting party in Abuja into the keeping of the current Oba of Benin, Ewuare II. A minority of Nigerian and European curators suspect that the royal dynasty in Benin City might turn out to be a more dependable guardian than politicians in a country racked by strife and graft. But dyed-in-the-wool anti-restitutionists see these transfers as proof of a decolonial potlatch at the West’s expense. They have unlikely allies in the radical, New York-based Restitution Study Group, which argues that the Benin bronzes at the Smithsonian belong to the descendants of slaves in the African diaspora, sold to white traders by the Oba’s predecessors. ‘Don’t transfer Benin bronzes to Nigeria and slave trader heirs,’ the RSG argued in 2022 against the Smithsonian’s de-accession. ‘Most were made … in exchange for enslaved people! Save them for heirs of the enslaved!’ The suggestion is that they should stay where they are until further notice.

One release that Brussels may soon sign off to the DRC is its itemised collection of human remains from the Belgian Congo, more than four hundred body parts, held in various federal research institutes and museums in Belgium. Yet even this is fraught. Not everyone in the DRC wants their abducted dead to be brought home. In 2018 the universities of Geneva and Lubumbashi signed an agreement for the restitution of seven ‘pygmy’ skeletons that were dug up in Wamba, in the north-eastern DRC, in the 1950s. But descendants of these dead fear that a physical restitution would bring on metaphysical disaster. At a colloquium on stolen remains in 2023, Wamba’s customary chief, Alexandre Medjedje, suggested that Geneva wanted to cast out the restless forces they embodied and repatriate them to Congo along with the bones. ‘Do these spirits not haunt you,’ he asked, ‘so that you decide today to bring these ghosts to us?’

The paths to restitution are unpredictable. Lumumba and two of his colleagues were killed at night in a forest an hour’s drive from Élisabethville (now Lubumbashi) in Katanga in 1961. They were buried in haste. The killers and their Belgian minders were right to worry that their crime might come to light and lead to a widespread nationalist upheaval. Days after the murders, a party was sent to dig up the bodies and bury them nearby, but deeper. Finally it was decided that they had to disappear completely. Gerard Soete, a former colonial police commissioner, was assigned to disinter them and dissolve them in acid. He saved a few identifiable remains, perhaps as evidence that the job was done. One was a gold-crowned tooth from Lumumba’s mouth, which he took back to Belgium; like Émile Storms, he hung on to his colonial trophies. When he died, his daughter Godelieve acquired the tooth and eventually went public in 2016; Ludo De Witte filed a complaint and it was confiscated by the police. Six years later the Belgian prime minister presented it to Lumumba’s daughter Juliana in a ceremony in Brussels. From Brussels, the tooth was flown to Kinshasa, where it was laid in a mausoleum as a relic of a desolate moment in Africa’s transition to independence. After the mausoleum was vandalised in 2024, the tooth was handed over to the care of Lumumba’s descendants.