Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat: A Productive Misunderstanding

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, originally a four-hour film, is still a very long 151-minute experiential and observational film by Johan Grimonprez. In my view, the filmmaker oversimplified and at times fabricated the intersections of US Civil Rights, jazz, literature, Cold War diplomacy, and the complicated domestic politics of Congo to focus on decolonization and the CIA’s murder of Patrice Lumumba in 1961. This is a documentary film that uses dramatic overlay. It prioritizes aesthetics over history like graphic collage and other forms of visual artwork where accounts of post-colonialism remove the causes, consequences and relevance of historical materialism and relative class privilege. For instance, both the work found in Social Studies (by Joyce Kozloff) and relatedly Climate Propagandas Congregation (BAK) stunningly mix time, space, media, and events at a confusing pace and sequence. It is this artform that can also reduce understanding of Africa as something simply understood through a strict lens of European exploitation and dominance.

This might not be the greatest of film reviews, but neither was the film. It is not uncommon for artists in the West to use postcolonial advantaged people of color with agency as props in a dramatic overlay to break down the capitalist system. Further, these artists and audiences are often far too confident in their altruism to realize that part of studying postcolonial non-white agency is to discover the ways in which the formerly colonized overlay the colonial mold to pursue their own set of privilege or political opportunities.

There is no question that Grimonprez’s work is detailed and aesthetically powerful. The same is true of Kozloff and BAK’s work. At times overwhelming, Soundtrack covers 1960, or the “Year of Africa,” a time that brought African nations into the UN while generating political upheaval inside the institution, placing great strains on the imperial powers of the past. Both the UK and France, and other countries like Spain and Portugal, however, were still colonial states in 1960, (even Belgium continued to have holdings) for decades beyond.

Lumumba’s death came just months after his election (the country won its freedom from Belgium in June of 1960). This nation, later known as Zaire (1971-1997) then the Republic of Congo, was recognized during the colonial period as the Belgian Congo under the brutal rule of King Leopold II. Congo was overwhelmed with conflict throughout much of its history as the general population, civic communities, and partisans all fought for governance and freedom at various periods. Amidst the chaos, violence, confusion, and insecurity, the United States and European governments joined forces to control the country’s abundant mineral supply under the banner of stopping communism.

In Killing Hope, a book Noam Chomsky called the greatest text ever written on the Central Intelligence Agency, William Blum writes about CIA director Allen Dulles and his targeting of Lumumba due to the popularity he received after decolonization. The US ruling class perceived him and any Congolese National Movement political victory as a destabilizing force. Naturally, US intelligence pretended to be concerned with the welfare of the so-called free world if communists were to take over Congo. Dulles authorized a fund to replace the prevailing government of Lumumba with a group more acquiescent to the interests of state capitalism. In other words, a coup or plot to assassinate Lumumba was formulated by the CIA. Lumumba’s main crimes consisted of winning an election and providing a good example for other decolonized nations seeking self-determination. According to Blum, both US president Dwight Eisenhower and the National Security Council shared Dulles’s concern that Lumumba was a danger to the postcolonial world.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

Soundtrack contextualizes Blum’s account well and shows how The United States and the United Nations under Dag Hammarskjöld were complicit in an armed intervention to take over Congo’s wealth and natural resources. They added to the racist legacy formation of Africa as “hopeless.” During this time the West was condemned by the USSR, perhaps cynically, as well as newly independent African nations and non-aligned Asian countries. All of this prompted the United Nations Security Council to move in with their own military support while displacing Belgian forces. This weakened the already fragile country and helped to undermine Lumumba’s leadership. The Central Intelligence Agency sent chemist and spymaster (“Poisoner in Chief”) Sidney Gottlieb, to Congo with a biological weapon to assassinate Lumumba, who had been kidnapped by the opposition. Lumumba was martyred as the assassination went on to encourage and signify colonial resistance throughout the developing world. Fidel Castro, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah, Bung Karno, and Jawaharlal Nehru were also perceived as charismatic anti-racist leaders on behalf of newly independent and non-aligned nations during the height of the Cold War.

A major motivation for the film is Grimonprez’s discovery of the United States Ambassador to Belgium William Burden, a MoMA trustee that had an economic incentive to support intervention and Lumumba’s assassination. A further primary source was the “We Insist! Freedom Now” NAACP concert featuring Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach. Both would later protest the Security Council and Patrice Lumumba’s murder along with Paul Robeson. This, however, did not stop two of the more radical performers, Roach and Archie Shepp, to cease playing music in Africa. They would appear again three to four years later, not in the spirit of rebellion or protest, but at the Festival of the Congo in 1964.

I found Grimonprez’s approaches in using music and the unpacking of colonization interesting if not confusing. One major reason for the film’s complexity is his intention to incorporate five narrators: Nikita Khruschev, In Koli Jean Bofane, Andrée Blouin, Conor Cruise O’Brien, and jazz music in general. I noticed laudatory reviews calling the film an intervention, revolutionary, and all about liberation whereby music is the protagonist and musicians are duped and portrayed as hoodwinked. Aside from the US and CIA’s role in assassinating Lumumba, (well outlined by Blum and others), I became interested in where the secondary source literature supported such claims regarding jazz ambassadors as decoys tricked into playing music against an imperial project, they might find reprehensible.

Further, I searched where Louis Armstrong ever seriously acted upon his alleged repeated claims to renounce US citizenship all throughout the 1950s and 60s. If this is presented in the literature and film, I wish it was more clearly substantiated. My suspicion is that he did not and that his rhetorical flourishes were dismissed as elite venting. To my basic understanding, for many black jazz musicians, their talents served as domestic and overseas opportunities to tour while providing lucrative sources of work. It would be unusual to assume that playing music on behalf of the US State Department constituted something outside of elite networking while performing on behalf of human rights. It was Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Eisenhower after all, and not the likes of Fanie Lou Hamer or Stokley Carmichael, pushing ambassadorship and diplomatic initiatives.

Race reductionism in art has been successfully established as militant by individual creators in all forms of visual expression and “blackness” is often used as a form of shorthand for resistance. Since race is a source of countless historical and geo-political atrocities, the trope parallels a profound emotional appeal. In the film, mere representation serves as a place of reasonable confrontation to the powers that be to the average viewer. Thus, unwavering and uncritical support for this film makes one revolutionary or at least a progressive consumer of art and history ipso facto. Soundtrack to a Coup d’État is a fashionable movie to consume and I speculate that quite a few people consider it a progressive examination of colonialism based on the reviews and interviews that I have read. It is clearly a movie of deep descriptive motivations, yet to me, there is no precise or powerful argument for connecting the musical icons to the larger imperial project. Soundtrack features a dramatic overlay that invites liberals to fancy themselves as radical without providing source verification for soft power jazz diplomacy, while lumping in Malcolm X, Nina Simone, and John Coltrane with the ambassadors all the while.

The concept of decolonization, which seemingly through the documentarian’s standpoint, was marked as a period where people of color, regardless of class positioning around the world, galvanized at the professional, international, and institutional levels, and how they collectively worked towards political revolutions. Further, we are to view the on-the-ground support or lack thereof for Lumumba as a mere anecdotal aside within Congo. Grimonprez attempts to carve out layers of what he calls horizontal and vertical time to take the audience on an emotive journey. Nina Simone and the voice of Zap Mama reading Andrée Blouin’s memoirs provide more emotional depth while In Koli Jean Bofane talks about African conflict in the 1990s. European exploitation, as Grimonprez accurately emphasized, reveals the racist manipulation of the global supply chain in the Congo and how it can be traced historically with rubber, uranium, copper, and cobalt. At the same time, it seems that these historical complexities that normally surround class privilege are so great that it produces a tendency in artists to rely on binaries of identity and nationhood to simplify a story around injustice.

The film does not pay attention to privileged or unprivileged African agency per se, except occasionally, as seen in the depiction of Blouin. Except, even in this instance, she is substantially minimized as a messenger among men of privilege. Material interests and explanations for events are often lost in far more subtle ways in other films as well. Take the 2021 fact-based film Judas and the Black Messiah, where Fred Hampton, a leader of the Black Panthers, is murdered by the FBI and William O’Neal. O’Neal also finds Hampton’s politics tedious and immaterial to his own interests. Also as characterized in Soundtrack, Lumumba in actuality exemplifies the image of a fated victim deceived by an entire class of people who should know better but are driven by a prerequisite to succeed. In the film’s defense, not even Blum, or most critics of US foreign policy, considers the full complexities of Lumumba’s leadership and reactions to it in Congo or the US. For instance, the film shows an agent paysan of Mobutu for just under two seconds. No rank-and-file civil right participants are featured in the film either. This predicament, common in such analyses does not help advance postcolonial study.

Cultural anthropologist Philippe-Richard Marius’s recent book The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society, cites in the notes the work of anthropologist Talal Asad. Marius pointed out that after colonization the formerly colonized did not simply and happily return to existing as the social beings they were prior to colonization. He explained that they became culturally changed beings, vulnerable to the lure of leading perceptions, desires and central modes of control. As such, to Marius, postcolonial black people were not dissimilar from other people in global capitalist modernity. Cultural anthropologists like Asad and Marius might posit that these facts vanish in Soundtrack to a Coup d’État.

Lumumba is a tragic sacrifice since formerly colonized Africans should not have surrendered to the attraction of luxury, but ultimately did. Black Jazz musicians aren’t supposed to play music for US imperial ambitions, but ultimately did. One should not assume that people once subjects (both real and imagined) are simply morally clumsy and simply letting themselves be corrupted by the evils of the West. The result of juxtaposing narratives this simply invites more dramatic overlay when we fail to understand the complexities of both the Congolese people and elite black American musicians in the 1960s. In this case, the result is a long and messy film.

I argue that when it comes to Patrice Lumumba, it is quite clear and understandable how he was very much emblematic of African resistance to western human rights abuses. He’s largely remembered as a hero of the working classes and as a dedicated Marxist in search of liberation for his people and unified homeland. At the same time, the scholarship reveals the limitations of relying on this historical memory of Lumumba orthodoxy or “productive misunderstandings” that fail to complicate the views of the Congolese ideologically, regionally, ethnically and economically after 1960.

I also question the way that the US State Department, and its utilization of jazz ambassadors deployed as part of Cold War era diplomacy, is depicted in the film. We are supposed to pretend that musicians were used by the government for reasons unbeknownst to them when the literature does not really reflect this alleged manipulation. Three musicians featured prominently in the film, Dizzy Gillespie, a political independent with varying viewpoints, lifelong Republican Duke Ellington, and nationalistic leaning Louis Armstrong, were more or less framed as repository figures sympathetic to non-elite people. It was puzzling to me that Armstrong’s words on Eisenhower and Little Rock in 1957 were downplayed. If anything, they serve as the primary source that verifies his disdain for the US misuse of power. Further mystifying was the absence of Thurgood Marshall, who challenged Armstrong (as did Malcolm X, more harshly), deeming Armstrong disingenuous all throughout the 1950s. If Marshall and Malcolm were to view this film, they might find Armstrong’s depiction somewhat comical. When Armstrong changed the lyrics in his song “Black and Blue” he did this to reflect the dilemma of his service to the country. Changing the words to “I am white on the inside,” could just as easily reflect a conflict over his jazz diplomacy as it presented the problems he faced in pursuit of full acceptance as an insider. Even prior to these Armstrong exercises of “soft power,” he toured places like Italy as early as 1935.

What is at the core of the fascination with oversimplifying both American civil rights and Congo’s geopolitical complexities in this way? As far as Gillespie, Ellington and Armstrong go, it was probably the reverse of what Soundtrack advances on their behalf. This level of artists and an abundant number of people for that matter, are less guided by “isms” but care much more about contributing to and maintaining structures of inequality found in institutions that work well for them.

Maya Angelou, another influential figure and artist featured in the film, protested the UN in 1961. Later in life she showed strong support for both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama once elected. Obama and Clinton were two of the main architects of the 2011 Libyan coup that implemented a violent intervention and support for regime change on the African continent. This state action revealed and produced a legacy of direct and indirect human rights abuses. This is not dramatic irony. This is how world history unfolds regardless of race. In all, I was curious to find out what this says about race and class and how might an American audience mis-contextualize the film because of the material investment in identity-based affiliation without applying historical scrutiny. If we use the present to connect to the past, Soundtrack looks like celebrity infighting in some ways.

Altogether, it seems Angelou was very much part of the US intellectual elite. And economic, political, and intellectual elites do not generally work at cross purposes. Similarly, Quincy Jones, Ellington, Gillespie and Armstrong were members of a US cultural elite whose works were validated by US institutions emblematic of elite symbolic power. As far as aspirational Western people go categorically, I discovered zero evidence for any public support or affinity for Lumumba’s policies on the part of the jazz diplomats, especially Armstrong after viewing the film.

Conclusion

In many ways Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (back by popular demand January 3-7 at Film Forum!) dazzled the eye and illuminated the mind. Yes, these times were fast moving and overly complicated and the brilliance and determination of artists should never be forgotten or disrespected. I am not insensitive to these matters. The archival material along with the timing, sequencing and structure of the documentary was clever, aesthetically powerful and emotionally potent. The utilization of sound, shoe banging, rare footage, actual jazz radicals (perhaps an intentional blurring) and carefully placed literary references were captivating and inspiring. Grimonprez, a prolific artist and researcher in all honesty, should also get high marks for including compensatory history that outlined Blouin’s significant contributions.

Further, I appreciate how Grimonprez had me refamiliarizing myself with other great decolonization films of the past. These were much like tales of fiction or “lies that told the truth” more so than documentaries in my view. First and foremost, of course, The Battle of Algiers (1966) provided a dramatized and complicated interpretation of the fight for Algerian independence. Made in black-and-white documentary style, it presented many veterans of that experience as the main actors. The movie was again released in 2004 and served as a crucial reminder of the consequences of US invasion, terror, and torture.

Other films of note were apartheid era films such as Cry Freedom (1987), where white journalist Donald Woods played by Kevin Kline befriends Stephen Biko played by Denzel Washington and Boseman and Lena (2000). Boseman featured Danny Glover and Angela Bassett portraying a couple’s shared struggle of survival. Additional movies that came to mind were The Kitchen Toto (1987), a drama about Kenya during the mid-20^th century’s Mau Mau uprising and The Year of Living Dangerously (1983). In short, these movies reminded me of how difficult it was to historically portray decolonization in a visual form.

Overall, it can’t be repeated enough that the film was incredibly impressive from an archival and artistic point of view. Furthermore, it showed in a quite fascinating way how music can be used to look at the topic of decolonization. At the same time, regardless of the film’s intent, academics and film critics should force us to pay special attention to the politics of racism together with people of color in positions of influence that have often replicated social disparities across racial lines.

This historical phenomenon might be lost on most woke American audiences after viewing Soundtrack who perhaps consumed the appealing tropes as a site of presumptive resistance to the powers that be. The historical narration gets lost because we are simply supposed to view this all, just knowing of an undefined “global zeitgeist.” Even through a lens of not quite history, but global politics, “the dulcet tones of cultural power,” remains an enigma that sounds good but lacks thorough scholarly support.

To be fair, documentaries, especially with this new type of immersive format are artforms that don’t necessarily require exactness in stating a precise thesis. You basically watch it to be entertained as if it were a movie and agree that a political earthquake happened in a time compressor without much context or chronology. You allow for film dramatization and inexactness in argument. Good movie biopics are also good for this reason. They use inaccuracies or poetic license that everyone accepts, especially if the film captures an essence.

The problem with Soundtrack, in my view, is that it misses on both accuracy and essence. The US State Department swung into action along with the CIA and for the first time needed jazz to handle official business? Are Ellington and then Armstrong, both with long careers of playing overseas, captured in a moment? To enjoy this, must you also forgive for the countless inclusions of other musicians gratuitously inserted into the film? Most crucially, and my point of departure, is the hard swallow required to accept that jazz can be used to interrogate colonial history.

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