In December 2024, the Vatican tasked Belgian archivists and historians with documenting the life and virtues of King Baudouin of Belgium, who reigned from 1951 until his death in 1993. Infuriated by Patrice Lumumba’s speech at the Congolese independence ceremony on June 30, 1960, Baudouin presided over the ossification of the Belgian colonial empire into the body and soul of the nascent Congolese state. He was also a staunch Catholic, and famously refused to grant royal assent to Belgium’s 1990 abortion bill, choosing to abdicate for 36 hours instead.

As a result, Belgium’s fifth king has enjoyed enviable endorsements from two of the most popular popes in living memory. Pope John Paul II described him as a “great guardian of the rights of the human conscience,” and it was none other than the late Pope Francis who opened Baudouin’s path to sainthood, initiating the Vatican’s official beatification procedure mere months before his own death—for a monarch who, in Francis’s words, had had the courage to “leave his place as king in order not to sign a murderous law.”

One of the many archival scenes in Johan Grimonprez’s documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat shows Baudouin arriving in Kinshasa (then Léopoldville) in June 1960. Bwana Kitoko, as the Congolese had dubbed him, radiates crisp white innocence as he descends from a shimmering SABENA¹ aircraft in a tropical-white military uniform. He doesn’t bother to remove his semi-transparent sunglasses before nonchalantly shaking hands with Joseph Kasavubu and Patrice Lumumba, the future president and prime minister of the nascent Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). On this day of “flag independence” for the Congo, Baudouin returns as a guest with loads of main character energy. When he first visited in 1955, the Congolese, who had expected an old and wise Belgian king, had nicknamed him Mwana Kitoko (beautiful boy). As he returned for the third time, older but none the wiser, the new Congolese government had updated the moniker to the only slightly less irreverent beautiful man.