(Johan Grimonprez, 2024, Belgium, 150 minutes)
In 1960, the same year the Democratic Republic of the Congo gained its independence from colonial rule and joined the United Nations, thanks largely to newly-elected Premier Patrice Lumumba, Louis Armstrong brought New Orleans-style jazz to the country. Starting in 1956, the US State Department had been flying jazz ambassadors around the world in order to promote diplomacy. That was the claim, at any rate.
If the Congolese appreciated what Louis and his band were putting down, Russian Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev failed to see the appeal of jazz, which he found cacophonous--he went so far as to compare it to gastrointestinal distress. More significantly, though, Belgium wasn't prepared to let the Congo go without a fight--not with all its uranium and other valuable resources--and just after Independence Day on June 30, 1960, when everyone should have been celebrating, things got ugly.
There's nothing quite as volatile as the combination of white supremacy and greed, and the UN and the US, especially the wealthy industrialist sector, sided with Belgium over the people of the Congo, who had democratically elected Lumumba. Systematically, the premier and select associates were ostracized, neutralized, replaced--and eventually killed.
When Louis learned that his concert was arranged as a distraction by anti-Lumumba forces, rather than the goodwill gesture he had been promised, he was so incensed he threatened to renounce his US citizenship and move to Ghana, one of several nations that supported Congolese independence.
Khrushchev, another Congolese supporter, may have been wrong about jazz, but he wasn't wrong about colonialism and imperialism (which makes Putin's recent actions vis-a-vis the Ukraine seem uglier than ever).
Using archival footage combined with interviews and readings and on-screen extracts from several non-fiction texts about the era, including Andrée Blouin's 1983 memoir My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria, Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez examines the politics of Belgium, the Congo, Russia, Ghana, Guinea, Cuba, and the US to show why a coup d'etat took place–and how jazz was involved.
The African and American music in the film, from Louis, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, Miriam Makeba, Nina Simone, and others can't be beat. If the leaders of the Western world abandoned the Congo in its hour of need, the jazz world, combined with literary luminaries like Maya Angelou, did everything they could to call out the injustice and show their support.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Grimonprez's highest-profile documentary to date, is one of the year's finest—and fiercest—documentaries.
Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat opens at Northwest Film Forum on Wed, Dec 4. Images from Kino Lorber (Congo speechwriter/chief of protocol Andrée Blouin) and ABC (Louis Armstrong / Getty Images: Universal Images Group). Kino Lorber releases the film on home video on Jan 7, 2025.
