The CIA, geopolitics and jazz in DR Congo

Roach and Lincoln’s performance is at the heart of the conflicts powering Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. Johan Grimonprez’s 2024 documentary looks at the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of DRC, in 1961, just months after their independence from Belgium. This was a Katangan operation, with Belgium pulling the strings and the CIA assisting (with the approval of US President D. Eisenhower). It sparked furious protests in several countries, including the US, where 60 Black activists crashed a UN Security Council meeting. Among the protestors were Roach and Lincoln.

These are just a few of the cross-currents in Grimonprez’s dense, exciting film. Instead of trying to straighten out the historical material—as most fiction films tend to do now—the Belgian director lets the events and personalities rub together and generate sparks. Lumumba is a focal point but there’s so much more going on: the United Nations as a staging ground for Cold War powerplays; the CIA as an agent of chaos; the violent last days of colonialism; the brief heydey of the Non-Aligned Movement.

Underpinning it all is jazz, a movement then at its most innovative and politically charged. After World War II, American stars like Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington were sent as emissaries to thaw or cement relations with other countries. “America’s secret weapon is a blue note in a minor key,” a 1955 New York Times headline read. This wasn’t lost on the musicians. Quincy Jones, then Gillespie’s arranger, complained, “We were the black kamikaze band, sent to every problem post.”

Few posts were more problem-ridden than DR Congo (“If Africa is shaped like a revolver, then Congo is the trigger,” Frantz Fanon wrote). Lumumba had fought to wrest his country’s independence the year before. The Belgians quickly installed a proxy government in the state of Katanga, retaining control over the mines there, which provided the US with uranium to build atomic bombs. They knew, though, that Lumumba had to be removed. The US, too, was wary of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s support for Lumumba. Louis Armstrong was sent to DR Congo—he later felt he was a decoy— at the same time teams arrived to take care of Lumumba.

Nearly all the interviews and footage in Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat are archival. But Grimonprez generates electricity from material’s placement and juxtaposition. These layers and rhymes have satirical bite; when Khrushchev talks about monopolies whose “strings extend from Brussels to the major NATO capitals”, his speech is intercut with a mixed-race audience of children watching a hand-puppet show. The dense sprawl is reminiscent of the acidic work of documentarist Adam Curtis, though Grimonprez, unlike his English counterpart, balances the sourness by allowing for the saving grace of art.

“Rhythm is my business,” Dizzy declares at one point. The same polyrhythms that drive jazz provide this film its skittering, energetic style. Even with the soundtrack muted, you can tell from the cutting and the cascading images what music is playing (Grimonprez also borrows the visual aesthetic of classic album artwork). The score is almost wall-to-wall: tracks by John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Eric Dolphy (drolly intercut with a pompous speech), Nina Simone. Given jazz’s debt to Africa, it’s a politically apt choice for this film: a complex matrix of influence and inspiration. There’s rhythm even in the rare moments when the soundtrack is silent. As writer In Koli Jean Bofane reads excerpts from his book Congo Inc., his hand draws elegant patterns in the air, in time with some unheard music.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is an elegy for a more hopeful era of global politics, when nations across Asia and Africa freed themselves from colonial rule. But one only has to look at DR Congo since the 1960s, rarely untroubled by conflict, to know that some wounds don’t heal easily. The idealism of the Non-Aligned Movement as shown in the film looks almost quixotic now. The crisis in Palestine today shows how little can be changed if the US doesn’t wish it so, and how hollow the UN is in times like these. Grimonprez reaches the same conclusion in his film, placing the blame on the Belgians and the US but also on the UN, under whose protection Lumumba was supposed to be.

One of my favourite passages involves the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Belgian surrealist René Magritte says, in reference to his painting The Treachery of Images, “The image of a pipe is not a pipe”, followed by a clip of then CIA director Allen Dulles smoking his pipe. We then hear the voice of William Burden, founder of MoMa, stakeholder in Katanga’s mines and US ambassador to Brussels: “Lumumba was such a damn nuisance. It was obvious the way to get rid of him was through political assassination.” Like a Thelonious Monk solo, what seem like tangents in Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat are actually connections waiting to be made.