THE STORY – Filmmaker Johan Grimonprez examines the political machinations behind the 1961 assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.
THE CAST – N/A
THE TEAM – Johan Grimonprez (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 150 Minutes
Since its birth in the African-American communities of New Orleans over a century ago, jazz has widely come to be considered the great American art form. For some audiences, jazz is familiar, often taking a familiar song and spicing it up with vocal scatting, while for others, jazz is wild, with musicians improvising music that goes wherever their minds take them. Both forms, however, are born from the Black experience, yet in a way that transcends race and makes it accessible for fans all over the world. Besides being used as a teaching tool for kids to learn literacy or history, jazz has also been used as an ambassador to break down barriers between conflicting nations, who may not agree on issues but who do love jazz.
What jazz had never been used as, however, was a weapon, or rather, an unwitting accomplice to murder. In 1960, however, African-American jazz legends such as Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, and Dizzy Gillespie were sent by the Eisenhower administration to Africa on a supposed goodwill tour. While these “jazz ambassadors to the world” were drawing the world’s attention, the CIA, meanwhile, was using them as a smokescreen as the agency put into action their plan for the assassination of the newly-elected Prime Minster of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba. This shocking meeting of jazz and murder is at the center of Johan Grimonprez’s extraordinarily detailed documentary, “Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat.”
With an artist’s eye, Grimonprez weaves an epic historical tapestry focusing on the Congo, which, in the late 1950s, was trying to assert its independence from Belgian colonialism. With other Western nations granting independence for its colonies, Belgium saw the writing on the wall for the Congo as well and reluctantly allowed for democratic elections to take place, which the pro-independence movement won handily, with independence leader Lumumba becoming the first democratically-elected Prime Minster of the Congo. If only the story ended there.
In his early weeks as Prime Minister, Lumumba made it very clear that the Democratic Republic of the Congo was to be a truly independent nation, much to the consternation of King Baudouin of Belgium, who no longer would have control of the area’s riches, including the Shinkolobwe mine, which was the number one supplier to the U.S. of uranium, the mineral crucial to the manufacture of atomic bombs. The Eisenhower administration, which desperately needed that uranium in the Cold War era, allied with Belgium and other Western powers to try to strike some kind of deal with Lumumba. However, when the Prime Minister announced that the Congo would instead link up with other African nations to form the United States of Africa, the CIA realized that Lumumba would have to be stopped by any means necessary.
What the U.S. needed was a distraction, and the State Department was happy to comply with the “Jazz Ambassadors” tour. Armstrong, Simone, and company came on board to spread the gospel of jazz to the mother continent, yet even within the group, there was an unease at representing a country where segregation was still the law of the land. Further complicating matters back home, Malcolm X offered his full-throated support of Lumumba’s plan for African independence, which he planned to tie in with the American civil rights struggle to create a proposal for human rights that he intended to bring before the United Nations.
Among the many remarkable elements of “Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat” is Grimonprez’s decision to tell his tale on an epic scale, which, despite the vast number of people, places, and issues that he introduces, he brilliantly manages to make sense. Shrewdly laying out his story like a fine spy novel — with one incident leading to another, one character interacting with another, one issue expanding to encompass another — he seamlessly builds the story brick by brick with seeming ease, thanks to the film’s true MVP, editor Rik Chaubet. Despite the doc’s 2-1/2 hour run time, Chaubet keeps the action moving, pausing just long enough to allow the viewer to take in all the information presented. Then, it’s on to the next crisis.
The staggering breadth of footage that Grimonprez has gathered may be the film’s most impressive element. Clearly, he has the receipts, with extensive clips of contemporaneous interviews on both sides of the struggle, as well as home movies of the story’s leading figures and news footage of civil unrest. all revealing the facts as they were presented at the time. Significantly, Grimonprez also includes footage of Lumumba’s speeches, which were long thought to have been lost. Add to the mix a number of colorful personalities, from both known (coy CIA chief Allen Dulles, shoe-banging Soviet chairman Nikita Khrushchev) to lesser known, including key player Andrée Blouin. One of the few women allowed at the table at the time, the Central African Republic women’s rights activist and politician spoke frankly from her own perspective about just how African self-determination was being undermined.
With that enormous amount of footage, the biggest challenge that Grimonprez faced was how to assemble these strands into a coherent whole. What could possibly hold them together? If we go back to our original metaphor of this film as a tapestry, though, the fabric that holds it all together seems obvious: jazz. So Grimonpez not only includes clips of the jazz ambassadors on their Africa trip but such other jazz greats as Charles Mingus, Ornette Colman, and John Coltrane as well, with musical choices often evoking the mood of the drama that surrounds them (Much praise to sound designer Ranko Pauković for making them all sound so flawless).
But, perhaps his most compelling marriage of jazz to politics is found in the clips of singer/actress Abbey Lincoln and her partner, drummer Max Roach. Not only is the pair shown in performance together, but Grimonpez has chosen to bookend the film with their continued political activism. As the film opens, Lincoln and Roach are joining author Maya Angelou in fighting or supporting African independence by protesting the assassination of Lumumba just one month before. The film’s final images center on Lincoln disrupting the General Assembly of the United Nations, defiantly pleading for U.N. action to stop the killing as she is being hauled off by security. It’s a chilling image of a jazz star whom we had seen singing so beautifully just moments before.
In the decades since the Lumumba assassination, history has not been kind to the actions of the American government, which have been called by many to be among the most shameful acts in U.S. history. Also widely decried was the duplicitous trading of the good name of jazz legends to create an effective cover for murder. “America’s weapon was a blue note in a minor key,” ran one report at the time. But the doc takes the time to note that, even in the present day, the West’s need for African uranium remains undiminished, as Apple and Tesla’s products remain dependent on the minerals taken from African mines. The struggle still continues, and “Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat” brings that point home with an epic story that provides a shock to the system, even to this very day.
