(Reviews of Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat)
SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D'ETAT.
Belgian multi-media artist, Johan Grimonprez, has acquired a reputation as an uncompromising film-maker with Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), Double Take (2009), and Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade (2016), But he has created his finest work to date with Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, which draws on a range of audiovisual and print sources to chronicle the impact that Congo's independence from Belgium had on the geopolitical scene at the height of the Cold War.
On 16 February 1961, a session of the United Nations Security Council was gatecrashed by 60 people protesting about the murder of Congo's first independent prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. Among them were singer Abbey Lincoln and drummer Max Roach, who are seen performing at a time when the United States was sending Black jazz musicians on ambassadorial trips to countries it was keen to prevent from entering the Soviet orbit. However, several were angry at the government for preaching democracy abroad while segregating and repressing its own African American population.
Clips from television programmes are used to put the situation in context. Congo had been under cruel colonial rule by Belgium since the 1908. However, it was announced by King Baudouin in 1959 that Brussels would withdraw once it was certain that a stable regime could be established in Léopoldville. No sooner had independence been granted on 30 June 1960, however, than opponents of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba started lobbying against him. Despite the reluctance of President Joseph Kasa-Vubu, he requested assistance from the Soviet Union, which had been outspoken on the subject of decolonisation.
Premier Nikita Khruschev had famously spoken on the subject at the United Nations in New York, where the block of 17 newly liberated African states were providing a headache for the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. They were being courted by non-aligned countries like India, Indonesia, and Egypt, which had started to play a larger part in world affairs after Gamal Abdel Nasser had humiliated Britain and France during the 1956 Suez Crisis. This was a watershed moment for a changing world, as was the emergence of Fidel Castro in Cuba, who had allied himself with the Kremlin.
Despite accusations, Lumumba was regarded as a Communist by Belgian PM, Gaston Eyskens. Concerned that the Union Minière mining company (which was supplying the US with materials for its atomic weapons programme) would fall into the wrong hands, he backed the bid for secession from Congo by the province of Katanga, which declared itself to be a sovereign state under Moïse Tshombe. Eager to prevent the situation from inflaming relations between the superpowers, UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld (the Swede who came in for a lot of stick from all sides) dispatched a peacekeeping force to the region.
As Baudouin sought to raise the country's spirits by marrying Fabiola de Mora y Aragón, his ministers were appealing to Washington for assistance. In order to placate Khruschev after his shoe-banging speech at the UN, Eisenhower insisted that he would not be interfering in the affairs of Africa. However, the CIA under Allen W. Dulles was keeping busy, while musicians like Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie are being sent on cultural goodwill missions by the State Department that allow agents to travel as part of their retinues. Fully aware of how they are discriminated against in their homeland, these artists are despised by Khruschev (who hates the jazz promoted by broadcasters like Willis Connover on the Voice of America radio station) and mistrusted by activists like Malcolm X, who is becoming increasingly feared by the white establishment.
With chaos reigning in Congo, Lumumba's former military adviser, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, exploits the situation to expel the Soviet emissaries and establish a new government. The coup leaves Lumumba in custody, but his cause is taken up around the world, with soundbites capturing musicians like Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, and John Coltrane expressing their views. Ultimately, any hopes of a United Nations of Africa were dashed, as Mobutu regained control of Katanga and reinforced his grip on power after Lumumba was killed at the age of just 35 on 17 January 1961.
Three days later, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as Eisenhower's successor. Many had little doubt that Ike had been complicit in Lumumba's execution. But, despite Maya Angelou joining Lincoln and Roach in their bid to shame the UN into acting, the world's attention was soon shifted away from Africa, as the threat of conflagration intensified. Moreover, the tide of Civil Rights advocacy also turned with the rise to prominence of Martin Luther King, Jr, while jazz was replaced by rock'n'roll as the sound of youthful rebellion. No wonder Dizzy Gillespie failed to make it to the White House in 1964. These developments are left largely unsaid at the end of the film, but they emphasise how differently things might have turned out in certain spheres had the Year of Africa not been so swiftly and calculatingly derailed.
Marie Daulne (aka Zap Mama) reads extracts from Central African Republic activist Andrée Blouin's My Country, Africa, while we also hear extracts from Belgian-Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane's Congo Inc. and Irish diplomat Conor Cruise O'Brien's To Katanga and Back, as well as passages from the recorded memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev. But it's the blend of archive footage and music that makes this so compelling in inviting comparison with Swedish documentarist Göran Olsson's The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (2011).
Often drawing out print media headlines for emphasis, Grimonprez, editor Rik Chaubet, and sound designer Ranko Paukoviæ make a magnificent job of using the music of performers like Melba Liston, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, and Miriam Makeba to complement the rhythm and pace of the content, while also revealing that America's secret weapon was `a blue note in a minor key'. This enables those not wholly au fait with the decolonisation and non-aligned movements to realise that there was a lot more going on in the world in 1960 than the stand-off between the US and the USSR. The trio also deftly compare the way Belgian and American politicians conducted themselves on camera and at the podium, with the expressions on the faces of King Bauduoin and his ministers as Lumumba tells it like it is in his Independence Day speech encapsulating centuries of white attitudes to Africa.
Grimonprez also leaves his audience in little doubt that nothing has changed, either in the Democratic Republic of Congo or in the United Nations or in the corridors of power in Washington, Moscow, and Brussels. Rap may also have replaced rock as the most influential musical form, but the status of people of colour has scarcely advanced since the 1960s and seems unlikely to change much with Donald Trump about to return to office.
Louis Armstrong once famously sang about a wonderful world. There's little evidence of it in this technically accomplished and intellectually astute 150-minute picture, which should give us all plenty to ponder this festive season - perhaps in a double bill with Xinyan Yu and Max Duncan's Made in Ethiopia.
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