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The gold-crowned tooth of Democratic Republic of Congo independence hero Patrice Lumumba has been buried more than 60 years after he was assassinated.
It is the only part of his body that exists after his remains were dissolved in acid.
The Belgian policeman who oversaw the disposal took the tooth as a trophy.
In a famous speech on independence day in 1960, in front of Belgian dignitaries including King Baudouin, Lumumba, aged 34, castigated Belgium saying that the Congolese had been held in “humiliating slavery”.
The Belgians were stunned as a black African had never dared speak like this in front of Europeans.
Lumumba was toppled as prime minister just over two months later. Then in January 1961, with the tacit backing of Belgium, he was shot by a firing squad, along with two allies.
Other Western powers were also suspicious of him, fearing that he was sympathetic to the USSR during the Cold War and some, including the US, plotted to assassinate him.
A Belgian policeman, Gerard Soete, was given the job of getting rid of the evidence. It was during that process that he pocketed the tooth and took it back with him to Belgium.
It was decades later that he revealed that he still had the tooth and only two years ago that a Belgian court ruled that it should be returned to the family.
