Image Source: Poster Art – Fair Use
Introduction
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, originally a four-hour film, is still a very long 151-minute documentary by Johan Grimonprez. While the filmmaker may have at times oversimplified the intersections of US Civil Rights, jazz, literature, Cold War diplomacy, and the complicated nature of domestic politics of Congo, he provides an excellent focus on decolonization and the CIA’s murder of Patrice Lumumba in 1961.
There is no question that Grimonprez’s work is detailed and aesthetically powerful. At times overwhelming, Soundtrack covers 1960, or the “Year of Africa,” a time that brought African nations into the UN while generating political upheaval inside the institution, placing great strains on the imperial powers of the past. Both the UK and France, however, and other countries like Spain and Portugal, were still colonial states in 1960 and even Belgium continued to have holdings for years beyond.
Lumumba’s death came just months after his election (the country won its freedom from Belgium in June of 1960). This nation, later known as Zaire (1971-1997) then the Republic of Congo, was recognized during the colonial period as the Belgian Congo under the brutal rule of King Leopold II. Congo was overwhelmed with conflict throughout much of its history as the general population, civic communities, and partisans all fought for governance and freedom at various periods. Amidst the chaos, violence, confusion, and insecurity, the United States and European governments joined forces to control the country’s abundant mineral supply under the banner of stopping communism.
In Killing Hope, a book Noam Chomsky called the greatest text ever written on the Central Intelligence Agency, William Blum writes about CIA director Allen Dulles and his targeting of Lumumba due to the popularity he received after decolonization. The US ruling class perceived him and any Congolese National Movement political victory as a destabilizing force. Naturally, US intelligence pretended to be concerned with the welfare of the so-called free world if communists were to take over Congo.
Dulles authorized a fund to replace the prevailing government of Lumumba with a group more acquiescent to the interests of state capitalism. In other words, a coup or plot to assassinate Lumumba was formulated by the CIA. Lumumba’s main crimes consisted of winning an election and providing a good example for other decolonized nations seeking self-determination. According to Blum, both US president Dwight Eisenhower and the National Security Council shared Dulles’s concern that Lumumba was a danger to the postcolonial world.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
Soundtrack contextualizes Blum’s account well and shows how The United States and the United Nations under Dag Hammarskjöld were complicit in an armed intervention to take over Congo’s wealth and natural resources. They added to the racist legacy formation of Africa as “hopeless.” During this time the West was condemned by the USSR, perhaps cynically, as well as newly independent African nations and non-aligned Asian countries. All of this prompted the United Nations Security Council to move in with their own military support while displacing Belgian forces. This weakened the already fragile country and helped to undermine Lumumba’s leadership.
The Central Intelligence Agency sent chemist and spymaster (“Poisoner in Chief”) Sidney Gottlieb, to Congo with a biological weapon to assassinate Lumumba, who had been kidnapped by the opposition. Lumumba was martyred as the assassination went on to encourage and signify colonial resistance throughout the developing world. Fidel Castro, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah, Bung Karno, and Jawaharlal Nehru were also perceived as charismatic anti-racist leaders on behalf of newly independent and non-aligned nations during the height of the Cold War.
A major motivation for the film is Grimonprez’s discovery of the United States Ambassador to Belgium William Burden, a MoMA trustee that had an economic incentive to support intervention and Lumumba’s assassination. A further primary source was the “We Insist! Freedom Now” NAACP concert featuring Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach. Both would later protest the Security Council and Patrice Lumumba’s murder along with Paul Robeson. This, however, did not stop two of the more radical performers, Roach and Archie Shepp, to cease playing music in Africa. They would appear again three to four years later, not in the spirit of rebellion or protest, but at the Festival of the Congo in 1964.
I found Grimonprez’s approaches in using music and the unpacking of colonization interesting but at times confusing. A major reason for the film’s complexity is his intention to incorporate five narrators: Nikita Khruschev, In Koli Jean Bofane, Andrée Blouin, Conor Cruise O’Brien, and jazz music in general. I noticed laudatory reviews calling the film an intervention, revolutionary, and all about liberation whereby music is the protagonist and musicians are duped and portrayed as hoodwinked. Aside from the US and CIA’s role in assassinating Lumumba, I became interested in where the secondary source literature supported such claims regarding jazz ambassadors as decoys tricked into playing music against an imperial project they might find reprehensible.
The film cleverly starts and ends with Nina Simone singing “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” and references Hugh Wilford’s, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (2008). Here, Grimonprez does cite how Simone unwittingly took part in a CIA funded tour of Nigeria in 1961 to create good will and feelings of optimism overseas at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War. I searched where Louis Armstrong ever seriously acted upon his alleged repeated claims to renounce US citizenship all throughout the 1950s and 60s after he was sent to Congo while Lumumba was placed on house arrest. If this is presented in the literature and film, I wish it was more clearly substantiated. It would be unusual to assume that playing music on behalf of the US State Department constituted something outside of elite networking (although Dizzy Gillespie refused debriefings) while performing on behalf of human rights.
In any event, since race is a source of countless historical and geo-political atrocities, the trope parallels a profound emotional appeal, adding to the effectiveness of the film although there are instances where it seems mere representation serves as a place of confrontation to the powers that be. Soundtrack to a Coup d’État is a fashionable movie to consume and I speculate that quite a few people consider it a progressive examination of colonialism based on the reviews and interviews that I have read. It is clearly a movie of deep descriptive motivations, yet to me, the arguments for directly connecting the musical icons as one to the larger imperial project is entirely too vague. Soundtrack might invite liberal viewers to fancy themselves as radical while lumping in Malcolm X, Nina Simone, and John Coltrane with the ambassadors all the while.
The concept of decolonization, which seemingly through the documentarian’s standpoint, was marked as a period where people of color, regardless of class positioning around the world, galvanized at the professional, international, and institutional levels, and how they collectively worked towards political revolutions. Further, we are to view the on-the-ground support or lack thereof for Lumumba as a mere anecdotal aside within Congo. At the same time, Grimonprez successfully carves out layers of what he calls horizontal and vertical time to take the audience on an emotive journey. Nina Simone and the voice of Zap Mama reading Andrée Blouin’s memoirs provide more emotional depth while In Koli Jean Bofane talks about African conflict in the 1990s. European exploitation, as Grimonprez accurately emphasized, reveals the racist manipulation of the global supply chain in the Congo and how it can be traced historically with rubber, uranium, copper, and cobalt.
The film does not pay much attention to African agency per se, except occasionally, as seen in the depiction of Blouin. Except, even in this instance, she is substantially minimized as a messenger among men who matter. In Soundtrack, Lumumba exemplifies the image of a fated victim deceived by an entire class of people who should know better but are driven by a prerequisite to succeed. In the film’s defense, not even most critics of US foreign policy consider the full complexities of Lumumba’s leadership and reactions to it in Congo or the US. For instance, the film shows an agent paysan of Mobutu for just under two seconds. No rank-and-file civil right participants are featured in the film either. This predicament, common in such analyses, does not help advance postcolonial study in my view.
When it comes to Patrice Lumumba, it is quite clear and understandable how Soundtrack breaks down how Lumumba was very much emblematic of African resistance to western human rights abuses. He’s largely remembered as a hero of the working classes and as a dedicated Marxist in search of liberation for his people and unified homeland. At the same time, the scholarship reveals the limitations of relying on this historical memory of Lumumba orthodoxy or “productive misunderstandings” that fail to complicate the views of the Congolese ideologically, regionally, ethnically, and economically after 1960.
I also question the way that the US State Department, and its utilization of jazz ambassadors deployed as part of Cold War era diplomacy, is depicted in the film. We are supposed to pretend that musicians were of one mind and used by the government for reasons unbeknownst to them when the literature does not really reflect this exact alleged manipulation. Three musicians featured prominently in the film, Dizzy Gillespie, a political independent with varying viewpoints, lifelong Republican Duke Ellington, and nationalistic leaning Louis Armstrong, were framed as repository figures sympathetic to non-elite people. It was puzzling to me that Armstrong’s words on Eisenhower and Little Rock in 1957 were downplayed. If anything, they serve as the primary source that verifies his disdain for the US misuse of power. Further mystifying was the absence of Thurgood Marshall, who challenged Armstrong, as did Malcolm X more harshly, deeming Armstrong disingenuous all throughout the 1950s.
What is at the core of the fascination with oversimplifying both American civil rights and Congo’s political complexities in this way? As far as Gillespie, Ellington and Armstrong go, it might be the reverse of what Soundtrack advances on their behalf. This level of artists and an abundant number of people for that matter, were less guided by Lumumba’s politics but cared much more about contributing to and maintaining structures of inequality found in institutions that work well for them.
Maya Angelou, another influential figure and artist featured in the film, protested the UN in 1961. Later in life she showed strong support for both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama once elected. Obama and Clinton were two of the main architects of the 2011 Libyan coup that implemented a violent intervention and support for regime change on the African continent. This state action revealed and produced a legacy of direct and indirect human rights abuses. This is not dramatic irony. This is how world history unfolds in terms of power, influence and official business.
Conclusion
In many ways Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, back by popular demand January 3-7 at Film Forum, dazzled the eye and illuminated the mind. The archival material along with the timing, sequencing and structure was clever, aesthetically powerful and emotionally potent. The utilization of sound, shoe banging, rare footage, actual jazz radicals and carefully placed literary references were captivating and inspiring. Grimonprez, a prolific artist and researcher in all honesty, should also get high marks for including compensatory history that outlined Blouin’s significant contributions.
Further, I appreciate how Grimonprez had me refamiliarizing myself with other great decolonization films of the past. These were much like tales of fiction or “lies that told the truth” more so than documentaries in my view. First and foremost, of course, The Battle of Algiers (1966) provided a dramatized and complicated interpretation of the fight for Algerian independence. Made in black-and-white documentary style, it presented many veterans of that experience as the main actors. The movie was again released in 2004 and served as a crucial reminder of the consequences of US invasion, terror, and torture.
Other films of note were apartheid era films such as Cry Freedom (1987) and Boseman and Lena (2000). Additional movies that came to mind were The Kitchen Toto (1987) and The Year of Living Dangerously (1983). In short, these movies reminded me of how difficult it was to historically portray decolonization in a visual form.
Overall, the film was incredibly impressive from an archival and artistic point of view. Furthermore, it showed in a quite fascinating way, how music can be used to look at the topic of decolonization. At the same time, regardless of the film’s intent, academics and film critics should force us to pay special attention to further question how jazz can be used to interrogate colonial history.
