SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ETAT

A doc’ about a coup in Congo in 1960 is both revelatory and shocking. And packed with musical cameos from celebrated African and African American musicians.

The great Louis Armstrong performs in Ghana (1956), a year before it realised independence from Britain. These State Department funded tours were a “soft weapon” of the CIA.

Prior to taking my seat in the cinema I had no plans to write on a documentary feature about the coup that overthrew (then murdered) Patrice Lumumba (the first Prime Minister of Congo after it won independence from Belgium) in 1960. Once the film finished and I stepped into the chilly Brixton evening, after almost three hours in the Ritzy, my mind was on fire. What a film. And what an awful and ongoing tragedy. I posted on Facebook, suggesting people should try and see it, and thought that was all I’d contribute. Two days later my consciousness is still overwhelmed by what I witnessed in the cinema.

I hope then that you won’t mind if I share?

Soundtrack To A Coup D'Etat is an epic (150 mins) documentary feature currently screening in certain UK cinemas. I imagine it is also being rolled out across North America and Europe. Not as a mainstream doc’ that might win awards and attract large audiences ala Amy or The Story of the Weeping Camel, no. This film deserves a wide audience (and all the awards that can be given), but its long and dense and intense and unsettling. No “feelgood” factor here. And its already upsetting Trump supporters – on IMDb there’s a hostile review from an idiot who rants about the footage of Fidel Castro...

What Belgian director Johan Grimonprez has constructed here is a documentary feature that works as a history lesson while also assaulting the senses. Not because Grimonprez pummels the viewer with shocking images or fierce rhetoric – he doesn’t – instead, he takes a brutal period of modern history that involved Belgium losing its largest colony (The Congo) and, extremely unhappy about this, determines that The Congo will remain under the coloniser’s thumb, even if this is via puppet governments.

Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba - pictured here in 1960 as a captive of Belgian/US interests.

Grimonprez links the efforts to destabilise newly independent Congo with the state of jazz in the US – the film opens with drummer Max Roach and his then partner, vocalist Abbey Lincoln, performing their immensely powerful (and furious) We Insist! Freedom Now Suite (also 1960). As the film weaves its way through the story of Patrice Lumumba’s rise to being elected as Congo’s first Prime Minister (and then being removed and, in early 1961, murdered), Grimonprez links how the CIA used jazz icons – Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Nina Simone (amongst others) – as soft power so to promote US values in African and Asia. This at a time when segregation was legal and brutally enforced in the US.

Armstrong, had in 1957, refused to undertake any more State Department tours due to the brutality Black school children were subject to in Little Rock, Alabama. He later softened his position – likely at his manager’s insistence – and one such tour took him and his band to Congo to serve as a useful distraction while the CIA and Belgian government operatives removed Lumumba via Congolese military brute Colonel Mobutu. Armstrong was, the film suggests, furious when he realised he’d been used.

Max & Abbey - a striking couple who made angry, inspired music.

Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln were never going to be invited by the State Department to front such tours, they being the most militant voices in American music circa 1960 – Nina Simone, who would later express her fury at the US government due to its racism and involvement in regime change, was (for a time) willing to go along with singing for the State Department – and in 1961 (immediately following the murder of Lumumba’s and two of his associates), they and Maya Angelou (now a celebrated poet/memoirist, then likely better known as a singer) and 57 fellow Harlem activists received passes to the UN from the Cuban delegation. Using these to enter the UN’s main hall while a session was underway, the 60 activists staged a loud, energetic protest that descended into violence as UN security attacked the protesters: Grimonprez has footage of this and its wild. I had no idea this event happened.

Plenty of footage from the UN – Soviet Premier Khrushchev, President Eisenhower, Prime Minister Nehru, Fidel Castro’s arrival at the UN (and Malcolm X, who by now has left the Black Muslims and developed into an articulate critic of Western imperialism and US racism). The film jumps around, touching on the Suez crisis and other world shaking events of the era (oddly, no mention of Algeria’s uprising). There’s also historic interviews with British and South African mercenaries, who were employed by Belgium to destabilise The Congo via terrorising communities – shocking in their openness about killing and terror being a profitable trade.

The music of the late Franco & TP OK Jazz is sublime Congolese rhumba. Franco deserves more attention and I wish the film had employed footage of him performing.

And the film keeps returning to music – John Coltrane’s Alabama is employed at one point to suggest jazz’s reaction to the brutality African Americans suffered in the US, while the great Congolese bandleader Franco’s song Vive Patrice Lumumba is included (lesser known Congolese artists whose songs reflect the time also appear: a musical soundtrack is on Spotify and, while it is jammed with jazz of the era, it only features two Congolese tunes and completely ignores South Africa’s Miriam Makeeba, yet the film features footage of her speaking and singing with righteous intensity). Overlooking African musicians for American… how very colonial.

That the coup was orchestrated by the US – Eisenhower and the CIA officials all come across as predictably smug, dishonest men intent on playing Cold War games – is unsurprising. Reflecting on Belgium, a small nation now only famous for waffles and beer and being home to the EU’s headquarters, the film reminds how humans, no matter how “boring”, can behave brutally when it suits their interests.

I had read Michaela Wrong’s nonfiction book on the Mobutu regime’s In The Footsteps Of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo when it was published in 2000 but that book, fascinating as it is, lacks the fury Grimonprez conveys in his film. As he demonstrates, the people of the Congo still suffer from murderous conflicts while the mineral rich nation provides the materials that power our smartphones.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat could be compared to Adam Curtis’ paranoid, refracted documentaries (and might be influenced by them), but its a stronger, more focused, less self-conscious feature. As our world slips further into enshitenment this 150 minute film serves as a reminder of how Western governments can behave wretchedly (I suggest we all follow Max & Abbey in making clear the wretchedness our governments endorse are not in our name). And, for those of us who love the arts, Grimonprez subtly reminds how creatives can both give voice to protest while also being used as a cover for political machinations.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is screening widely. In London you will find showings at the ICA, Institute Francais, various Picturehouse cinemas and more. I believe it will stream on Kanopy in the US in the new year.