In 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower gave a speech to the United Nations, nobly imploring member nations to allow Congo to emerge independent of colonial power Belgium.
“The people of the Congo are entitled to build up their country in peace and freedom,” he said. “Intervention by other nations in their internal affairs would deny them that right and create a focus of conflict in the heart of Africa.”
All the while, however, the Eisenhower administration, Belgium, and even the UN leadership were plotting to overthrow Congo’s first democratically elected leader, Patrice Lumumba. Meanwhile, Eisenhower’s State Department was simultaneously dispatching leading Black American jazz artists to Congo to serve as unofficial goodwill ambassadors, disguising U.S. political intentions there.
This is the scenario explored in the award-winning documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, directed by Johan Grimonprez. The film played as part of Deadline’s For the Love of Docs series, followed by a conversation with the filmmaker.
“The United States engages Black jazz investors, sending Black jazz investors over to the Afro-Asian geographic area — the friction zones — to actually win hearts of the minds of the Global South,” Grimonprez observed. “But what’s peculiar is with, for example, Louis Armstrong arriving in the then-just newly independent Congo is that … he’s used as a decoy to hide that actually there’s a coup d’etat being plotted by the CIA underneath.”
Director Johan Grimonprez
Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for BFI
Grimonprez, a native of Belgium, spent years studying this pivotal era of history when many African nations were gaining freedom and forming an alliance with other “non-aligned” nations – countries that did not want to take a side in the Cold War contest between the U.S. and the USSR – asserting themselves in the context of the 15th UN General Assembly that convened in 1960.
“We researched the United Nations very thoroughly from the 23rd of September, 1960, all the way to mid-October. And we found really some jewels,” he said. “What I think is sort of at the cusp or the heartbeat of history is to see that intimate footage of personalities very much involved in that story, spliced between how actually the world was sort of in a big, big, big, big change.”
Congo was at the nexus of that change as the possessor of perhaps the richest store of natural resources of any country on the planet. Belgium had exploited its colony for natural rubber (in the process, committing atrocities on the Congolese people) and then the U.S. coveted its uranium to power the atom bomb. Congo also contained vast amounts of copper ore, cobalt ore, diamonds, and other mineral wealth. As the documentary shows, Belgium did not want to lose those riches to an independent government, so it helped convince the U.S. to see Prime Minister Lumumba as a threat.
Patrice Lumumba in ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’
Kino Lorber
“Belgium labeled Lumumba as a communist to get the United States on their side. But the film starts with Patrice Lumumba saying, ‘I’m not a communist. I’m actually an African, I’m a nationalist. I’m actually coming up to choose the destiny of my own country,’” Grimonprez noted. “Malcolm X said — the end of the film alludes to that — it’s not communism or socialism, Marxism, they [the U.S. and Western allies] are afraid of. It’s actually people choosing their own destiny, for being a patriot, for being a nationalist and choosing that also the people of your own country can benefit from the riches.”
On Tuesday, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat earned four nominations for the IDA Documentary Awards, including Best Documentary Feature and a directing nod for Grimonprez. It is nominated for three awards at the upcoming Cinema Eye Honors. The documentary has won numerous awards at festivals around the world including at Sundance, where it earned a Special Jury Award for Cinematic Innovation.
Watch the full conversation with Grimonprez in the video above.
For the Love of Docs is a virtual Deadline event series presented by National Geographic. It continues with a new film screening each Tuesday through December 3. Next up: Never Look Away, Lucy Lawless’ documentary about Margaret Moth, the extraordinary CNN camerawoman who braved bullets and bombs to capture the story of war.