Johan Grimonprez’s magisterial documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’État isn’t just about jazz, it isjazz. Just as it isn’t only about politics, it’s a political act in itself.
The film is jazz in how it’s built up musically, rhythmically. Not just because the story is driven by a jazz score, featuring live performances by some of the greatest musicians of the time circa 1960: Miriam Makeba, Ornette Coleman, Duke Ellington and many others. It’s the editing and storytelling itself which breathe jazz, in the way they introduce recurring themes and motifs, speed up and slow down, zoom in, pause, improvise, then jump to another narrative thread, another melodic line, without ever losing the beat or through-line. It’s exhilarating to watch.
And the film is a political act because it doesn’t just inform on a political subject matter – the successful Belgian and American attempts in 1960 to sabotage Congo’s independence – it enrages. With surgical precision, a wide-ranging argument is presented which carefully, rhythmically builds to an exposure of international neo-colonial politics which continue to this day.
It is as intellectually satisfying and physically irresistible as a great jazz performance.
Meanwhile, the link between the US- and Belgian-backed coup d’état in Congo, within months of independence, and the film’s jazz score is more than simply recalling the times and setting a mood, and certainly more than a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. Soundtrack to a Coup d’État shows that jazz and colonial politics have historically been entwined on many levels.
Grimonprez’s documentary was partly inspired by the Black protestors who gained entry to the United Nations Security Council (with the help of the Cuban delegation) to denounce the assassination of Congo’s first democratically elected leader, Patrice Lumumba – demonstrating how the African struggle for independence resonated with African-American civil rights activists. Among those shouting down the UN delegates were jazz greats Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach, whose proud live rendition of We Insist! bookends the film. Lumumba was assassinated after direct involvement of President Eisenhower, who wanted to secure America’s access to Congo’s uranium deposits – which had fuelled the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – and prevent the USSR from gaining a foothold with a new Congolese government. The ruthless Mobutu was handpicked as Lumumba’s successor.
In the first hour or so, Belgian Grimonprez, master of the historical remix with acclaimed works such as dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), Double Take (2009) – both available for free on his website – and Shadow World (2016), manages to sketch out the global political context with almost unbelievable clarity. As the film progresses at full throttle, we see the newly independent African countries changing the voting balance at the United Nations, resource-hungry world powers jostling for influence on the African continent, the Cold War confrontation between former military man Eisenhower and boisterous Soviet leader Khrushchev, and the rise of the Non-Aligned Movement outside of the Western and Soviet blocs, and all while the revolutionary demand for decolonisation circled the globe.
When Congo became independent on 30 June 1960, Grimonprez wryly notes, the Dow Jones index fell sharply.
Not that we ever hear Grimonprez’s voice, as far as I can tell: we only hear contemporaries (some of whom gave their interviews at a later date), eyewitness biographies (including those of Belgian-Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane and the formidable Central African Republic women’s rights activist and politician Andrée Blouin) and lots of jazz. It’s all from the archives. The superb sound design and expert editing remix those materials into a cinematic groove, in which the jazz itself often seems to lead the proceedings, as when Nina Simone’s plaintive voice accompanies a United Nations vote as country after country is called upon to say yes or no to the demands for independence. Sometimes, speeches of political leaders actually appear to follow the beat of musicians like Art Blakey or Dizzy Gillespie.
But it’s Louis Armstrong who plays the most dramatic role, sent to Congo by the US government as a goodwill ‘Ambassador of Love’, part of what one commentator described as the ‘Cool War’ of globetrotting American jazz musicians. As one newscaster put it, “America’s weapon was a blue note in a minor key.” Only later would Armstrong realise that he was being used as a smokescreen for American covert operations, with CIA agents even infiltrating his entourage. Just as another CIA operative notes approvingly that they controlled three members of Lumumba’s first cabinet. Meanwhile, even the UN, led by double-speaking Secretary General Hammarskjöld, is exposed as a direct accomplice to the coup through the misuse of the first substantial UN peacekeeping force ever. And I’m only scratching the surface here – Soundtrack to a Coup d’État contains many more layers of cinematic dissection and political deception.
Many of these historically damning facts only came to light much later, sometimes quite recently, as we can see from the footnotes which pepper Grimonprez’s film – too fleeting to check on the spot, of course, but there for anyone who wants to check their sources later, as a kind of added Wikipedia layer. And most people will probably end up watching this film online anyway, where it’s easier to pause, copy and paste. It’s something I particularly appreciate as so many documentarians fail to clearly identify their sources in their films – asking us to more or less blindly trust them. Above all, by sharing his sources, Grimonprez shows his openness to critique – which only increases his film’s credibility.
Unexpectedly, there is quite some humour here, especially of the absurdist kind. Grimonprez includes a clip of Belgian surrealist René Magritte explaining how the image of a pipe is not itself a pipe, before showing authorities publicly promoting their image as post-colonial supporters of African independence, while secretly practising the exact opposite.
It’s the music which keeps the momentum going. But let’s not forget that jazz can also rip your heart out. When the first goosebump-inducing notes of Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’ sound, you not only realise but feel how perversely the hopes and dreams of newly independent Congo have been crushed by incessant international power politics and their henchmen – there are even interviews with mercenaries describing their missions, one grinning German still wearing his Iron Cross.
Which only highlights how this international fight over resources was fuelled by deep-seated racism. Just listen to former Belgian PM Eyskens, proclaiming in a televised address that Belgium’s continuing presence in Congo was “not to satisfy colonial or imperialist aspirations, but to complete a mission of civilisation for the benefit of a less developed people that for its salvation and ascension depends so much on the white people, and the Belgians.”
It was after completing his documentary on the international arms trade, Shadow World, that Grimonprez felt the need to tackle his own country’s darkest past – the colonial rule of Congo. One way in which this issue reaches into the present is that, sadly and shamefully, it is only relatively recently that the full horrors of the colonial era have become part of the political debate and into public consciousness, with new research and facts still regularly coming to light – and not just in Belgium.
But in another way is, the horrors have never ended. More than seventy years on, the UN is still debating its presence in Congo. And the country’s resources are still being plundered. Just as Malcolm X reproaches his Afro-American listeners in Soundtrack to a Coup d’État for their inability to align their struggle for freedom in Mississippi with the one in Congo, so does Grimonprez’s documentary painfully remind us that our economic and political systems are still inextricably linked to the continuing neo-colonial oppression of the Congolese population.
Belgium, France, The Netherlands, 2024, 150 minutes
Director Johan Grimonprez
Production Onomatopee Films and Warboy Films
Producers Rémi Grellety and Daan Milius
International sales Mediawan Rights
Script Johan Grimonprez
Archival researchers Judy Aley, Rémondepanis, Pauline Burgaud and Alexander Markov
Editing Rik Chaubet
Sound design Ranko Pauković
With Patrice Lumumba, Nikita Khrushchev, Dag Hammarskjöld, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Miriam Makeba, Art Blakey, Andrée Blouin
