It is mid-afternoon in the Belgian parliament in Brussels and an elderly African man, right hand half raised, is promising in loud, rather guttural French, to tell the truth and nothing but the truth about a 40-year-old murder. In an atmosphere that is part courtroom, part lecture hall, Geert Versnick, the Flemish liberal chairing the meeting, puffs at a cigarette and flicks through the documents piled on his desk. Among the largely white audience there is a sprinkling of other Africans, including reporters taking notes.
But the casual mood is deceptive, for what is under examination by a formal parliamentary commission is one of the darkest chapters in Belgian history: the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected leader of independent Congo, in January 1961.
Lumumba's ghost haunts the stuffy committee room where Versnick and 14 other MPs are trying to determine the precise role of the Belgian state in one of the 20th century's most notorious political murders.
Four decades on, it is still a highly charged, emotional tale. Some believe, now as then - at the height of the cold war - that Lumumba was a communist subversive doing the Kremlin's bidding, and that King Leopold's legacy in the vast central African country was benign and civilising, not greedy, cruel and racist.
Yet for many, the memory of this talented, charismatic Congolese remains close to his contemporary image as the darling of the left (Jean-Paul Sartre called him "a meteor in the African firmament") in a period when anti-colonial struggles in Algeria and Cuba were the rallying cries of progressives everywhere.
In death, he achieved almost iconic status. Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University was long a magnet for third-world students. More recently, Ronan Bennett's novel The Catastrophist and a highly praised new film by Raoul Peck have kept interest alive.
It was the 35-year-old Lumumba, the product of a peasant family and mission schools in Kasai province, who dared, in the Palais de la Nation in Leopoldville, in June 1960, to challenge the stifling paternalism of the departing rulers, describing, in front of a flabbergasted King Baudouin and Belgian prime minister Gaston Eyskens, the injustice, inequality and exploitation his people had suffered under 80 years of colonialism.
"We have known sarcasm and insults, endured blows morning, noon and night because we were 'niggers,'" he declared in a protocol-bending, jaw-dropping address that brought thunderous applause from the Africans present and a stony silence from the Belgians. And that extraordinary speech, said Victor Nendaka, giving evidence to the commission, was the "detonator" for what happened afterwards.
Nendaka, who became Congo's security chief, and was intimately involved in the drama of Lumumba's final days, chose the right word. It is an explosive story with all the ingredients of a fast-moving thriller. And it ends in terrible violence.
Lumumba's crime was to adopt a radical agenda, restricting capital flows, implementing price controls and launching a militant foreign policy which threatened both Belgian and US interests, worrying powerful financiers and mine owners as well as governments.
Within days of its independence, the Congo was in chaos. Mutinies by the Force Publique triggered Belgian military intervention, the secession of the copper-rich province of Katanga, led by Moise Tshombe but manipulated by the Belgians, and the arrival of UN troops.
Lumumba, alert to the dangers of tribalism, tried desperately to prevent the country's break-up, but his enemies multiplied. In September 1960, with the CIA already planning to kill him with poisoned toothpaste (according to the frank account of the agency's former station chief Larry Devlin) President Joseph Kasavubu dismissed him, and the army commander, Joseph-Desire Mobutu, moved to arrest him.
Lumumba escaped from Leopoldville (today renamed Kinshasa) and tried to join his followers in the provinces, but although protected by Ghanaian UN soldiers, he was detained. Both the US and Belgium had decided that, even out of power, he posed an unacceptable danger.
On January 17 1961, he was delivered to his enemies in Katanga, where he and two aides were shot by an execution squad commanded by a Belgian. The following day his body was sawn up by a Belgian police commissioner called Gerard Soete and dissolved in sulphuric acid. Soete later admitted he had pocketed two of Lumumba's teeth, but threw them into the North sea.
L'Affaire Lumumba has been around for so long that, as with other lingering historical mysteries, it is often hard to sort out what is new and controversial and what is well known and established. But by this autumn, when Versnick's commission is due to finish its work, there should be a definitive, de-mythologised version - and most likely a formal apology from the Belgian state for the crime committed in its name.
Initial findings published earlier this month showed clearly that Eysken's government actively sought to neutralise Lumumba politically. Tantalising details about different plots - Operation Barracuda, Operation L and Action 58316 - have surfaced from the archives. So has the name of a mixed-race assassin known only as Georges, controlled by a shadowy Belgian colonel called Louis Marliere, who admitted subsequently he had been offered "a crocodile hunter to bump off Lumumba."
In time-honoured fashion, there is no explicit written order to kill him, but a document signed in October 1960 by Harold Aspremont-Lynden, Belgian minister for African affairs, talks of Lumumba's "definitive elimination".
Not all the witnesses summoned by the commission remember too clearly, and perhaps not only because most are now in their 70s and 80s. "You are screwing us around," Versnick angrily rebuked one Congolese, Albert Ndele, to applause from the public gallery at this unparliamentary language. "You are lying."
And not everyone thought this strange. "Why are you surprised that they don't remember anything?" asked one member of the public. "Why should anyone put their own head on the block?" It may be unsatisfactory, but that things have progressed thus far is a tribute to one man, Flemish historian Ludo De Witte and his book, The Murder of Lumumba, which is published in English next month.
In seven years of ploughing through the archives, De Witte accomplished what had never been done before, penetrating the screen of lies, obfuscation and self-censorship of a Belgian state that could never come to terms with the ugly way its only colony had won its freedom - and its grim history since.
It was De Witte's carefully documented revelations which led to the creation of the commission, and partly because the present liberal-led government is the first since 1960 not to include the Christian Democrats, who were in power at the time.
"It is a sort of reward for my work," De Witte said, "but I am afraid. There are interested parties who want to hide a lot. The stakes are very high because if the full truth comes out it may well be embarrassing not only for the Belgians, but the Americans and British too. The whole Belgian establishment was implicated in this affair. And they will certainly want to limit the political damage."
Little attention was paid to the commission's work until, in April, police raided two sets of premises to seize documents. Nendaka's flat in the smart Brussels suburb of Uccle was one target. The other, intriguingly, was the office of Guy Weber, a retired major now working for the Belgian royal family at the Chateau d'Argenteuil, home of King Leopold III's widow Princess Lilian. Weber, military adviser to Tshombe, is to appear in a closed session. Investigators have also tried to locate a secret bank account, possibly containing some of the 30m francs allotted for "exceptional circumstances" in December 1960.
Witnesses so far have included Tshombe's daughter, who insisted her father had nothing against Lumumba - when the evidence shows he was there when the execution took place, and Francois Lumumba the dead man's son. Close attention will be paid to the testimony of Etienne Davignon, a former European commissioner and one of Belgium's great and good. In 1960 he was a special emissary for foreign minister Pierre Wigny: the minister's own private papers remain closed, and all records of the secretive Congo Committee have disappeared.
Congo was ill-served by the men who killed Lumumba. Yet many of them did well under Mobutu's kleptocratic rule of the country he renamed Zaire and which Laurent Kabila inherited, only to be murdered himself. Lumumba's wish - that Africa would one day write its own history, and that it would be one of "glory and dignity" - has yet to be fulfilled.
Establishing the truth is a necessary task, for Belgians and other Europeans. "The goal is to get a clear account of our own history," says Geert Versnick. "We need to show Africans that we are prepared to look clearly at what we did in their countries. We lecture them about human rights and good government and the rule of law. And they ask us: 'What did you do here?'"
The Murder of Lumumba, written by Ludo de Witte is published by Verso on July 19
