Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat

A bold documentary, framed against the jazz of 1959-60, tells how the U.S. helped subvert the government of Congo after independence. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a feat of radical mixed media, put together by Belgian director Johan Grimonprez, documenting the world situation in the 1950s Cold War and how it led to the overthrow of the newly formed government of the Congo and the assassination of its leader, Patrice Lumumba.

It’s called a soundtrack because there were Black Americans, jazz artists, that the State Department sponsored as “Jazz Ambassadors” of friendship from the U.S. to emergent African nations, including Congo. The biggest star was Louis Armstrong, but the group also included Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie. We see period footage of those musical tours. Later, the artists complained that they’d been used as a kind of “soft” cover for the actions of the CIA destabilizing the region. Grimonprez uses their music, and that of a host of other figures, many of them part of the “bebop” genre of the late ‘50s: John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, and many more, and we also get excerpts from interviews with them about the civil rights and black power movements. For the film, jazz makes a connection between the awareness of Black Americans at that time, and the turmoil in Africa.

The amount of information presented in the picture is prodigious, but the jagged style, bold graphics and amazing period footage make it never less than fascinating. Starting with the period of Nasser and the Suez “crisis,” Grimonprez creates an atmospheric impression of those times in international news. The deliberations of the UN are a central concern. The rise of a “non-aligned” bloc of African and Asian nations caused the Americans and western Europeans to panic. Khrushchev declared support for the decolonization movement and for Lumumba, as did Castro when he came on the scene. The Belgians, who had ruled Congo with bloody ferocity since they stole the land in 1885, were conceding independence, but Lumumba wanted his country to control its own mineral and energy resources. The Belgian corporations didn’t approve of this. They sponsored a puppet government in the south of Congo, and the UN approved its membership. From then on, the inexorable path of subversion led to the end of Congo’s dreams of autonomy.

There are alarming excerpts from interviews with CIA and other intelligence agency officials. They smirk as they describe the clever ways they created division and conflict. The head of the CIA at the time, Allen Dulles, jovially puffs on a pipe and denies everything. UN Secretary General Hammarskjöld is shown trying to make compromises, and becoming hopelessly compromised himself. We hear the American newscasts—the point of view was always that of anti-Communism. That was just the way people in America thought. This film shows that it was determined by secretive and illegal actions designed to perpetuate Western financial interests in the former colonies.

Throughout the film we see Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach perform a piece called “Freedom Day.” In February ’61 the two of them led a group of about sixty activists into the UN Security Council, disrupting the meeting and loudly protesting against the murder of Lumumba in January. We see this in the film, and it is unforgettable.

As we hear near the end of Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, “No one will give us our freedom. We have to take it.”