For the politically sensitive African and European viewers of Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, there can be only two main emotions after the end credits roll: grief and guilt. If the African is Congolese, the grief ought to be magnified. If the European is Belgian, the guilt should be consuming. Distributors should find no problem in selling this important work to anyone interested in documentaries and history in territories the world over.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat tells the complex story of the murder of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in a complex, cacophonous manner. Implicated in the telling are the UN, the U.S., and the Kingdom of Belgium. All three entities’ evil adventures resulted in the aborted dreams of a newly independent African state. Decades later, we know that Belgium still enjoys the fruits of plunder that actually began with King Leopold II a century before, while the Congo has never really known peace since.
Grimonprez puts together a ton of material — memoirs, home video, books, newspaper reports, songs — to sometimes overwhelming effect. His tale is ostensibly about music forming the backdrop to murder. But every account of what happened in 1960s Congo inevitably lands on one country’s oppression of another.
For Grimonprez, it is important to share a detail, one that isn’t known to everyone concerned about the Congo travails. While plans were being put in place to silence Lumumba and come out on top during the Cold War, the U.S. was also sending its jazz musicians to engage in regions of interest. The musicians themselves were oblivious.
Nina Simone went to Nigeria unaware that her trip was bankrolled by the CIA. Louis Armstrong realized belatedly that he was a tool in the hands of a government that wasn’t treating people with the colour of his skin fairly. Even when some half-understood the purpose behind their trip, they seemed to underplay what was really going on. “The weapon that we will use is a cool one,” Dizzy Gillespie said to an interviewer, smiling.
Intentionally or not, there is a brief passage of screen time in which the words and images on screen give us some heavyweights of history, Eisenhower, Churchill, Khrushchev among them, and the viewer notices that these are all white men. The black men who do show up are Armstrong and company. The juxtaposition is telling. The big decisions — war, Cold War, diplomacy, nuclear disarmament — are made by white men. The black men are singing jazz, their force reserved for blowing into musical instruments with unbelievably inflated cheeks. If you want to take it farther, you could say that while the world rests on the shoulders of Caucasians, the black man is just entertainment.
In global political terms, as pertaining to the United Nations, that white/black U.S.-dominant paradigm was primed to change after 1960, the year that several African countries became independent. Grimonprez presents reports discussing the powerful potential these countries will come to hold if they vote in the same direction. The Cold War was on, so the fear really was that African countries might lean towards Russia and the very scary concept called Communism. Something had to be done.
Belgium was also fearful and not quite pleased with what was coming, especially after Lumumba’s famously controversial speech on the occasion of the Congolese independence on June 30, 1960, a point made more explicitly in the IDFA 2022-premiering documentary Colette and Justin. The country figured it would lose billions if it relinquished control of Katanga, a region replete with the money-spinning mineral uranium. Something had to be done—especially to the man who seemed like he would insist on total independence.
The fears of those two countries pretty much suggest that Lumumba’s mistake was in not forming an alliance with any of the powerful entities interested in his country. Russia, through Khrushchev, who banged his shoe and excoriated the U.S. during a UN assembly, was rather slow in acting. The UN, which ought to have intervened impartially, was led by a man who at some point privately disposed of Lumumba’s wish for a U.S. visa in order to present his case at the UN. The combination of American and Belgian fears and the UN’s strategic reluctance produced results that, in hindsight, sealed the fate of Lumumba and his country.
In Grimonprez’s film, this connection isn’t made explicitly, perhaps because he presents his material without a talking head or voiceover holding the viewer’s hand through this intricate history of the West’s dangerous entanglement in a country seeking sovereignty. But the attentive viewer will understand that it was a confluence of events that led to the tragedy of Lumumba.
Thus, in place of banal clarity, Grimonprez has chosen artful complication. His technique of bombarding the viewer with text and videos of different colour profiles, over the crash-crash-crash of jazz music, is often disorienting, as though Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is more conceptual art than documentary. Somehow it works — in a way that demands a second viewing, maybe even a third to take it all in. The curious can then head to some of the well-detailed sources he provides. Considering the never-ending mess of the Congo, maybe a documentation that is in itself inexhaustible seems apt.
Still, there is something missing from the tale. We are told that Lumumba was killed without any details. Those familiar with history know of the gruesome death and disposal of his body. Perhaps the omission of the details is an act of mercy, a homage of sort. But it’s impossible to know for sure.
For projects of this sort, there might be the question of appropriation. Is it Grimonprez’s place to tell this story? It definitely is. The history of the Congo’s devastation with the U.S. and UN’s complicity is not the history of one country and its people. Grimonprez, a Belgian, has much right to the tale as anybody else. And he has done a remarkable job. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is an impressive feat—a feat of design, narration, sound, and cinema.
Director, screenwriter: Johan Grimonprez
Narrators: Marie Daulne, In Koli Jean Bofane, Patrick Cruise O’Brien
Producers: Daan Milius, Rémi Grellety
Co-Producers: Katja Draaijer, Frank Hoeve, Johan Grimonprez
Editor: Rik Chaubet
Sound design: Ranko Paukovic
Production company: Warboys Films
Venue: Sundance (World Cinema Documentary Competition)
In English
150 minutes
