Jazz and decolonization are inextricably linked in Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, short-listed in the Documentary category of the European Film Awards. The film is a masterful study of Congo’s independence from Belgium in 1960, the rise of pan-Africanism, the inevitable neo-colonial backlash, and the murder/assassination of Congo’s newly elected PM Patrice Lumumba in February 1961.
It also details the unwitting role that jazz ‘ambassadors’ such as Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington played in providing a smokescreen for covert CIA operations far beyond US borders, in Congo, Syria and Iraq respectively.
It is a complex tale of hope and betrayal, with telling cameos (in archive) from the likes of Central African Republic activist and Lumumba speech-writer Andrée Blouin, Malcolm X and even Belgian surrealist René Magritte, as well as a shoe-thumping Nikita Khrushchev who demands, and wins, a UN vote for immediate decolonization worldwide, in the process reminding the US of its deeply flawed race relations record, both then and in its past.
And there is jazz, lots of it, which both drives the story and defines the metre of the film, its syncopations matching, beat for beat, the chaos of the times. There is contemplative jazz (Nina Simone) and there is joyous jazz, both from presidential candidate Dizzy Gillespie (he declared as an independent in 1964) and Armstrong. And there is gloriously cerebral jazz that turns in its own head space, as played by Thelonious Monk.
When Lumumba and his fellow Congolese politicians were in Brussels to negotiate independence in 1960, the African Jazz Orchestra was also in town. Its song ‘Independence Cha Cha’ became the anthem for the liberation movement across the African continent.
Then there’s Abbey Lincoln and Max Roache who led the infamous revolt at the UN to protest the murder of Lumumba and whose performance of ‘We Insist!’ book-ends the film.
But as one correspondent in the film puts it: “America’s weapon was a blue note in a minor key,” referring to the way its performers were used as a smokescreen to obfuscate nefarious US practices, most notably Louis Armstrong whose concerts in the Congo took all the headlines, just as Lumumba was under house arrest, and Mobutu was poised to seize power.
“You had the two Dulles brothers (John Foster and Allen). One is Secretary of State of the State Department, the other one is running the CIA,” says director Grimonprez. “The CIA is plotting (an overthrow) while the other one is sending jazz ambassadors. It’s very schizophrenic.”
Grimonprez further points out how much of the jazz we see in the film was sourced from Belgian television, which broadcast a lot of it during the 1960s, just as revolt in the Congo was being suppressed. “As with the jazz ambassadors, this sort of schizophrenic relationship with jazz on television in Belgium is at the same time another way to cover up,” he says.
Archive throws up some mindboggling oddities. Who could have imagined that Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro would embrace on the streets of Harlem, the latter thrown out of his hotel during the UN Special Assembly, only to be rehoused in Harlem’s Hotel Theresa, courtesy of Malcom X?
“Placing that in the historical context of the blank page of history that was never told in my country was something very revelatory,” says director Grimonprez.
Yes, the late 50s and early 60s were, initially, optimistic times, and radical political change seemed possible with the Non-Aligned movement of African and Asian countries finally able to flex their collective political muscle, with Congo at the heart of the matter.
But the resources that Congo controlled were just too valuable to lose, reckoned the US and Belgium (and the UN, it seems, in retrospect). Foremost among these resources was the uranium that fuelled the nuclear industry and which was mined out of the Union Minière in Katanga, in the south of the country. Very soon after Congolese independence was declared, Katanga was annexed or ring-fenced against central government control, a result of last-minute legislation passed in the Belgian parliament before Lumumba could take power.
Assessing all of this, Grimonprez is left with no option but to point the accusatory finger at his home country of Belgium.
“The whole United Nations story, which I knew about [with] Nikita Khrushchev slamming his shoe, I never thought it was actually in relation to the Belgian Congo, our country,” he admits. “So our country [Belgium] had a huge impact on how the West was about to deal with this whole sense of hope and the independence movement of the Non-aligned countries at the beginning of the sixties [and] the Afro-Asian block gaining majority in the United Nations.”
The opening scene of the film has Lumumba declare, “I am not a Communist, I am an African.” By the end of the film, any sense of true sovereignty among the Congolese is expunged. From a Belgian and US perspective, Patrice Lumumba was “ground zero” and the Western powers had their replacement lined up. The film may head towards the historic UN General Assembly with Castro, Khrushchev et al, but a week later the upstart Mobutu was in place to “grab power with the help of the CIA and Belgium,” reminds Grimonprez.
“But of course I can only tell the story from my Belgian perspective as a good colonialist,” he adds with irony.
Grimonprez has perfected the art of the historical remix, in which he recontextualises archive, with previous, acclaimed works such as dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997) and Double Take (2009). Is this an area in which he feels particularly comfortable, or is the very feeling of discomfort that which drives him to make these types of film in the first place?
“Well, history should make everybody uncomfortable,” he answers. “History writing is always re-writing – it’s trying to look at what’s not been written, at what’s fallen between the cracks.” Most of what has happened in the past was never written up as history, he says, and it’s that sense of “unspoken-ness” that generates his sense of discomfort and inspires his docs. “Then [you] start telling the story from there.”
“It’s interesting also, of course, to try to tell a history story from the point of view of the music,” he adds. “You see and you listen carefully. That’s what elephants do, right? Every hour they stop and they stretch their ears and then they listen to where they’re going to go next.”
