Hearing the Congo Coup

Frann Michel

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
Director: Johan Grimonprez
Distributor: Kino Lorber, 2024.

NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV BANGS his fists on a UN desk to the rhythm of Max Roach drumming his “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.” This synthesized audiovisual motif in Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat captures some of the film’s exhilarating aesthetics as well as some of its complex artifice.

Khrushchev and Roach both denounced western imperialist violence against colonized people, albeit with somewhat different motives and modes. (Khrushchev’s call for decolonization did not extend to Soviet influence: we see footage from his visit to New York of protesters with signs opposing Russian rule in Ukraine and USSR action in Hungary.)

Khrushchev disliked the “cacophony” of jazz, yet seems to be banging out its rhythms. What we see and hear in the film is not exactly what happened. But maybe close enough for jazz.

Background

In 1960, Patrice Lumumba became the first Prime Minister of the newly independent Republic of the Congo (later the Democratic Republic of the Congo or DRC).

He had been in office barely two weeks when Belgian officials began discussing his overthrow, and a little over a month when U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower told CIA Director Allen Dulles to have Lumumba eliminated.

Directed by the Belgian media artist Johan Grimonprez, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat addresses these events and their wider contexts. This not only includes decolonization, pan-African and non-aligned movements, the actions of the U.S. and Belgian governments, the United Nations, and Congolese political rivals, but also the uses of music as both propaganda and rebellion — and the ways that deceptions can bend in surprising directions.

As Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja noted in The Guardian on the 50th anniversary of the killing, Lumumba’s crime, in the eyes of the United States and other western powers, was Lumumba’s determination to control Congo’s resources in the interests of improving the living conditions of the Congolese people.

The film opens with, and returns to, the moment in February 1961 when singer Abbey Lincoln, drummer Max Roach, writer Maya Angelou, and 57 other protesters disrupted a meeting of the UN Security Council to protest Lumumba’s murder.

The DRC was one of 16 newly independent African countries admitted to the United Nations in 1960, a change that shifted the majority vote away from the old colonial powers. Although Belgium no longer officially ruled its former colony, the European power wanted to retain control of its riches.

The United States wanted continued exclusive access to one of the world’s biggest supplies of uranium, crucial to making atomic bombs, just as Congolese sources of coltan are today crucial to making cell phones and cobalt to lithium-ion batteries.

The United Nations, still a new institution, wanted to retain its authority, though its leaders favored the stability of the western-dominated status quo. And rival politicians in the DRC were willing to ally with colonial powers for their own interests.

Neocolonial Coup

Three days before official independence, Belgium had privatized the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, chief source of Congo’s extracted wealth. Despite official independence, the military remained under the control of white Belgian officers, and rank and file soldiers soon mutinied.

Belgium sent troops to protect white colonists and support secession of the breakaway state of Katanga that included the most valuable mines.

The UN sent its first peacekeeping troops, but refused to defend the newly independent government, so Lumumba sought Soviet support. The “Congo Crisis” was a proxy conflict in the so-called Cold War.

In response to the unfolding neo-colonial power grab, Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe on his desk at the UN. Denouncing America’s color bar and UN complicity in the overthrow of Lumumba, he called for immediate decolonization worldwide, a resolution approved by the newly diverse General Assembly.

Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department was sending African American musicians to Africa as “Jazz Ambassadors,” including Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie, purportedly to win African hearts and minds. But Washington also sent covert CIA operatives along on their tours.

By the time Lumumba was deposed, there seemed a dozen plots in the works to assassinate him, with the complicity of agents and mercenaries from the UK and Ireland as well as Belgium, the United States and the Congo.

Complex Cinematic Essay

That is an extremely compressed and probably contestable summary of just some of the key events that Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat includes, but it gives no sense of the experience of watching this impressive cinematic essay.

At any moment in the film, we may simultaneously have musical performances on the soundtrack along with voice-overs reading from key texts, while on screen we may see both archival footage and textual passages complete with citations to author and title. The next moment, different images, different voices, different texts.

This is a lot to take in, and more than one viewer has commented on this style resulting in confusion or fear that one is missing things, though others have appreciated it as “thrilling” (Screen International), “exhilarating” (Little White Lies), “breathtaking” (Guardian).

The style of the film arguably echoes the complexity of history, the uncertainty of political struggle, the syncopations of jazz, the layering of the griot’s narrative circling an event.

Tsogo Kupa observes in a review in Africa is a Country that Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat breaks with “Conventional forms of filmmaking” that “have manufactured an expectation for legibility in our cinema.”

Gerald Horne and Anthony Ballas, writing in Scalawag Magazine, suggest that the film’s “collision of often disparate visual, sonic, and textual elements,” by “demanding the viewer’s attention” offers “an antidote to the rote, distraction economy of social media and . . . so much of our contemporary media sphere.”

If descriptions like “dazzling” (LA Times) or “stunning” (New York’s Amsterdam News) might imply a blocking of critical thought, they may also suggest a break that invites thinking differently.

Because the film is now available on streaming services for at-home viewing, there is of course also the option to pause the film to read the texts, or to watch this long film in installments, thus allowing for an experience that recaptures some of the cognitive stability otherwise sacrificed to aesthetic elation.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is neither a primer nor a last word on any of the subjects it engages. We merely touch on the 1955 Bandung Conference of non-aligned states, Nasser’s 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal and the ensuing invasion by Anglo-French forces (with unmentioned Israeli participation), the 1958 All African People’s Congress in Ghana.

The film does provide a linear chronology, with titles in colorful 1960s-style fonts announcing dates in relation to DRC’s official independence from Belgium. But alongside this linear march through the brief tenure of Patrice Lumumba as political leader, we move back to the 19th-century origins of King Leopold’s private rubber plantation, forward to advertisements for iPhones and Teslas, sideways to Dizzy Gillespie’s 1964 run for U.S. president. Some departures from linearity are more obvious than others; some, but not all, are acknowledged in text on screen.

Many of the voiceovers and filmed readings of texts come from memoirs by Central African Republic political activist Andrée Blouin, who served in Lumumba’s cabinet; Irish diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien, who served as UN Special Representative to the Congo; Belgian-Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane, author of Congo, Inc.; and Nikita Khrushchev.

Other voices are included, including considerable footage and audio of Malcolm X, making explicit connections between the U.S. civil rights struggle and the larger context of decolonization struggles, and highlighting the significance of imperialist resource extraction and the liberating power of solidarity.

Resistance Space

Though the rhetoric of anticommunism served as proxy for concern about control of capital resources, the attention to propaganda opened some space for resistance.

The alternative to capitalism posited by the existence of the USSR helped pressure the USA to enact some elements of a social welfare state, and, for the sake of international public relations, to concede some domestic challenges to legal racism and segregation.

Likewise, decolonization movements around the world gave inspiration and support to internal liberation movements.

The film offers scenes of major figures including Dag Hammarskjold, Fidel Castro, Miriam Makeba, and others from around the globe. We hear from musicians other than those in the U.S. program, including the African Jazz rendition of “Independence Cha Cha” and Cuban bandleader Pérez Prado doing “Que Rico el Mambo.”

Quotations from Langston Hughes, Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire appear, along with passages from many other documents and scholarly texts. We see clips from television news and advertising footage, educational and propaganda films, Dadaist silents, home movies from Blouin and Bofane.

For all its complexity, the film inevitably omits much, as any account must. Where Raoul Peck’s dramatization in Lumumba (2000), for instance, gives us scenes of his life with his wife and children, while omitting his visit to the United States, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat includes the travel and omits the family.

With its breadth of reference rather than depth of analysis, the impression the film leaves is perhaps not so much of external interference in national affairs as it is of the web of global relations from which nation-states are historical precipitates.

Daniel Falcone in Counterpunch suggests the film gives too much prominence to political and musical stars, flattens differ­ences among the political views of the various musicians as well as the complexities of Lumumba’s politics, and slights “African agency per se.”

Targeting Lumumba

The film certainly downplays the complexity of the over 200 (often regional) political parties in the Congo of 1960, stressing instead the axis of decolonial struggle. Frederic Vandewalle, head of Belgian Intelligence in the Congo, notes that he was pleased to see that at least three members of Lumumba’s cabinet were “[our assets].”

It’s not clear which three he meant, but Belgium and the USA also provided support, in some cases through the proxy of the UN, to other figures including Joseph Kasa-Vubu, who in the ceremonial role of President later declared Lumumba dismissed from office; Moises Tshombe, who led the breakaway province Katanga; and Joseph Mobutu, who handed a captive Lumumba to Tshombe’s forces, and later took control of the nation himself, renamed it Zaire, and ruled as Mobutu Sese Seko until 1997.

Interviewers repeatedly ask Lumumba if he is a communist, and he repeatedly asserts he is an African nationalist, but knows he is called communist because he cannot be bought off by western imperialists.

In a 1958 speech, Lumumba calls on brothers and sisters, factory workers and office workers, rich and poor, intellectuals and laborers, Africans and Europeans, Catholics, and Protestants, Kibanguists and Kitawalists, to build a nation together.

Clearly the nationalist vision, in which rich and poor can build a nation together after rejecting imperial domination, loses out to class and colonial interests. But alongside material interests were psychic investments in racial empire and a demand for African deference.

At the ceremony of independence, Lumumba refutes Belgian King Baudouin’s claims about Leopold’s civilizing mission in favor of calling out the violence of colonialism and lifting up the Congolese struggle for independence.

This speech had no immediate consequence for Belgium’s control over Congo’s mineral wealth. But it evidently stung, and the demand to control the subaltern’s words as well as wealth weighed heavily. Ironically enough, it was U.S.-backed military dictator Mobutu who later nationalized the mining industry.

Imagery and Paradox

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat emphasizes other kinds of irony and paradox, as well. The Belgian surrealist Magritte’s discussion of “The Treachery of Images,” in which a painting of a pipe is not a pipe, is juxtaposed with the treacherous spymaster Allen Dulles lighting up. His characteristic gesture is later paired with Eva Gabor advertising pipe tobacco as among the “good things in life.”

Some sequences introduce strikingly bizarre images. Record players air dropped by the Voice of America offer a surreal vision of the lengths to which western propagandists were willing to go. A baby elephant on water skis suggests the precarious footing native Africans are forced to master. Elephants appear in alien elements, walking underwater or lifted through air.

Voice of America producer Willis Conover’s appearance on the 1960s game show “To Tell the Truth” recalls Grimonprez’s longstanding interest in doubles and imitations, as in Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), about airplane hijackings and their fictional representations, or Double Take (2009), about Alfred Hitchcock meeting his future self. We see Black children playing in white masks, hear Dizzy Gillespie imitating Louis Armstrong.

The references to modernist art are developed in a description of the Board of New York’s Museum of Modern Art as a “Who’s Who of CIA connections,” and examination of the role of MoMA President William Burden, Jr.

A CIA asset, stakeholder in Katanga’s mining industry, and ambassador to Brussels, Burden admitted in a recorded 1968 interview that he promoted the idea of killing the Prime Minister because “Lumumba was such a damn nuisance it was perfectly obvious that the way to get rid of him was through political assassination.”

Call me naive, but I found it surprising that killers were so forthcoming about their actions. ‘Mad Mike’ Hoare even published a memoir, Congo Mercenary (1967), and we see him looking cheerfully forward to the prospect of being “back in business” soon.

Some of the politicians and spymasters are more reticent, and the film effectively juxtaposes official denials with contravening evidence. Eisenhower at the UN vowing the United States will not interfere in the Congo by any means is countered by the findings of the 1975 Senate Church Committee and by testimony from Larry Devlin, CIA station chief in the DRC.

And here’s the veteran coup-master Allan Dulles saying, “as far as I know we don’t engage in assassinations and kidnappings and things of that kind,” juxtaposed with, well, everything here.

Long Consequences

In one of the many scholarly texts on which the film draws, Ludo De Witte argues that Lumumba’s killing was “the most important assassination of the twentieth century,” for reasons including not only its global context but also its ongoing consequences for the Congo.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat reminds us that United Nations troops have occupied the DRC continuously since 1999, and that tens of thousands of Congolese have been treated for rape in hospitals in the mining districts. We see recent footage of Congolese internal refugees dodging bombs, and hear Bofane discussing the continent’s waves of genocide.

Literally, a “soundtrack” is part of a film; the metaphor of a “soundtrack to his­tory” emphasizes the construction of stories through which we make sense of that history.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat provides no clear path to a different future. But its assemblage of audiovisual records attends to a crucial fork in the political road where people’s agency, creativity, and hopes for autonomy lost the struggle with capitalist empires, yet were not defeated.

September-October 2025, ATC 238