Explorers and Adventure

Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza died

Happened: 1905-09-14

Description

The last tour of the Congo took a hard physical toll of Brazza, and on his return journey to Dakar he died of dysentery and fever (amid rumours that he had been poisoned). His body was repatriated to France, and he was given a state funeral at Sainte-Clotilde, Paris, prior to interment at the cemetery of Père Lachaise. His widow, Thérèse, dissatisfied with the politicians' subsequent behaviour, had his body exhumed and reinterred in Algiers (capital of present-day Algeria). The epitaph for his burial site in Algiers reads: "une mémoire pure de sang humain" ("a memory untainted by human blood").

In February 2005 Presidents Nguesso of Congo, Ondimba of Gabon and Chirac of France gathered at a ceremony to lay the foundation stone for a memorial to Pierre de Brazza, a mausoleum of Italian marble. On 30 September 2006, de Brazza's remains were exhumed from Algiers along with those of his wife and four children. They were reinterred in Brazzaville on 3 October in the new marble mausoleum which had been prepared for them and had cost some 10 million dollars. The ceremony was attended by three African presidents and a French foreign minister, who paid tribute to his humanitarian work against slavery and the abuse of African workers.

The decision to honor Pierre de Brazza as a founding father of the Republic of the Congo has elicited protests among many Congolese. Mwinda Press, the journal of the Association of Congolese Democrats in France wrote articles quoting Théophile Obenga who depicted Pierre de Brazza as a colonizer and not a humanist, declaring him to have raped a Congolese woman, a princess and the equivalent of a Vestal Virgin, and to have pillaged villages, raising highly charged questions as to why the colonizer should be revered as a national hero instead of the Congolese who fought against colonization.