Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat marries the dark history of the United States’ assassination of Congolese Premier Patrice Lumumba, done with the full consent of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskold and several other western leaders, with music from some of the great American jazz musicians of the time – as the U.S. was sending them on friendly missions to emerging post-colonial Africa. The contrast between this blue-note diplomacy and the vile, racist machinations of the CIA, President Eisenhower, and their co-conspirators makes it a tense, compelling watch, even though you probably already know how this ends. It was one of the five nominees for this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. (I watched it free on Kanopy, which I can access through my local library, and it’s also on iTunes, Amazon, etc. for rental.)
The film has no narration but does use some on-screen quotes to keep things moving along, which allows the music to continue throughout almost the entire film. It’s a who’s who of mid-century American jazz, including Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Melba Liston, and others, most of whom visited Africa on state-sponsored goodwill tours and/or became pan-African activists at home, tying the movement to U.S. civil rights efforts. (Gillespie’s quixotic campaign for President in 1964 gets prominent mention, even though it came three years after the Lumumba assassination.) The story begins several years before Congo’s independence, with scenes from independence movements across colonial Africa, speeches from African and American activists – including several from Malcolm X – and significant footage of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who became a champion for African independence movements because those groups often espoused socialist or communist ideology. Much of what plays out before Lumumba is elected happens at the UN, where we see speeches from Khrushchev and from ambassadors from Belgium, the U.S., and many non-aligned nations that had already obtained independence. The on-screen text also explains the importance of the Congo’s vast mineral resources, which at the time were led by huge uranium deposits that could be used in nuclear weapons, although today the emphasis has shifted towards coltan, a mixture of niobium (columbium) and tantalum that is extremely important to the manufacture of capacitors for electronic circuits – like you’d find in whatever device you’re using to read this.
This all sets the scene for the intrigue that ultimately led to the torture and murder of Lumumba by a rival leader, Moïse Tshombe, who led the breakaway State of Katanga. Tshombe was interested in power, and Katanga is the most resource-rich region of the country, so he had plenty of backers in the west. Days before Congo became independent, Belgium privatized the mining company Union Minière, taking the dominant force in the Congolese economy away from the native population and depriving the new government of a major revenue source – the final insult in Belgium’s seventy-year misrule of the territory and abuse of its citizens. Union Minière was based in Katanga, so Tshombe was the perfect stooge for the west, and was happy to oblige first through his political activities, smearing Lumumba as a communist, and then later through violence.
Throughout the film, director Johan Grimonprez (who is Belgian) intersperses the history of the conflict and subterfuge with the music, a jarring but effective choice that turns the whole endeavor into a visual fugue, with the music the counterpoint to the infuriating history on the other side. The struggle for independence across Africa, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, went on just as Black Americans were fighting Jim Crow laws, and the response of the United States government in both cases was built on suppression and violence. At the same time, President Dwight Eisenhower, who apparently was an early proponent of assassinating Lumumba, tried to use American jazz stars to spread American culture to these new and emerging nations, calling them “jazz ambassadors” and sending them around the world to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, southern and eastern Asia, and to Africa. Louis Armstrong’s tour of the Congo, which appears to be the only time the State Department sponsored such a tour in the continent, turned out to be a cover for the CIA’s coup. Over 100,000 people showed up to watch him perform in the capital, then still called Léopoldville, while Lumumba was under house arrest; less than two months later, he would be dead at the CIA’s hands.
No country bears more responsibility for the now 65-year tragedy of the Congo, a fake nation with borders set up by Belgium’s King Leopold that has been beset by civil war for nearly all of its history, than Belgium does. Grimonprez gives more attention to the United States and the UN, but gets a few stabs in at Belgium, particularly in how Belgian leaders and officials tried to claim that colonizing the Congo was almost an altruistic affair, bringing civilization to a “less developed” people. Their colonial rule was one of the most brutal and damaging of any, a story hinted at here and told at great and gruesome length in Adam Hochschild’s tremendous book King Leopold’s Ghost.
The film ends with Lumumba’s death and the turning of sentiment on the part of the jazz ambassadors against the U.S. government, although there will still a few more such tours into the early 1960s. There isn’t so much a conclusion here, as the stories of the Congo and the CIA’s involvement in coups and assassinations would continue for decades, and the U.S. does still occasionally send musicians out on goodwill tours, if not quite to the same level as they did in the late 1950s. It’s an important slice of history, not just for Africa but for the United States as well, a reminder of the great power we can wield through the impact of our culture and the value of our diversity, and the great evil we can do when we do not hold the powers that be accountable for their actions.
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