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NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground There are certain people of whom it is difficult to say anything which will at once throw them into relief—in other words, describe them graphically in their typical characteristics. These are they who are generally known as “commonplace people,” and this class comprises, of course, the immense majority of mankind. Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than real life itself. For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person’s nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine—. I think such an individual really does become a type o...

Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm



SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ETAT (2024)

 


It’s a dazzling, tune-filled collage of images, words and sounds, recounting the moment during the Cold War when Congolese independence, hot jazz and geopolitical tensions made a sound heard around the world. But also, how that music was muffled by lethal instruments of capitalism and control, still a factor on the global stage.

To see the archival footage of Patrice Lumumba, which serves as the backbone to the forceful documentary “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” is to witness a daring future that, due to the rot of colonialism, tragically never came to pass. The foil to the film’s incisive use of newsreels, excerpts from biographies and political speeches is the kinetic wielding of jazz music.

On October 28, 1960, for instance, Louis Armstrong jubilantly arrived in the Congolese capital of Leopoldville (renamed Kinshasa in 1966) to perform. He came to a country that has always mystified the Euro-centric imagination as part of a U.S. State Department-sponsored tour of Africa. Four months earlier, the Republic of the Congo’s bid for independence had become a living reality. Three months after Armstrong’s performance, with the murder of Lumumba, the dream had already died.

Belgian director Johan Grimonprez’s dense, encyclopedic film “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” does more than tell viewers about the downfall of a revolution, one that conceived of a pan-African movement composed of a dozen countries that gained independence from their colonial overlords. It tells viewers how industrialist countries, primarily in the West, are still picking the bones of a broken promise decades later.
It was a time, after all, when jazz greats like Louis Armstrong and Melba Liston were dispatched as cultural ambassadors to Africa’s post-colonial regions, only to realize they were smokescreens for covert ops intended to undermine movements like Lumumba’s and protect multinational interests in the region’s valuable minerals like uranium. It was music as message, artists as distractions. But the 1961 murder of Lumumba, after months of plotting by U.S., Belgian and Congolese agents (and tacitly approved by President Eisenhower), signaled the end of the Western façade. It was the beginning of a fiery new human rights effort.



The film’s organizing narrative swings back and forth from machinations at the U.N., where Khrushchev’s shoe-gavel taunts accompanied an emerging Afro-Asian bloc, to the violent chessboard that was newly independent Congo and the brief, espionage-ridden tenure of its first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, the lightning rod of African independence. What “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” makes clear through Grimonprez’s reckoning with his own country’s colonial wreckage is that Belgium — with the help of U.S. and British intelligence — had no intention of giving Lumumba a chance to gain a foothold.



Johan Grimonprez’s documentary Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat reveals the curious link between Black Americans’ fight for civil rights and the assassination of Congo’s first democratically elected Black African prime minister

Half-way through Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat, John Coltrane and Duke Ellington’s soulful version of In a Sentimental Mood is interrupted. Suddenly, we see and hear Malcolm X giving a speech at New York’s Harlem Square in 1960. It’s like being shaken from a delicious reverie and thrown into the ice bath of reality.

“You’ll never get Mississippi straightened out,” Malcolm X snaps at the Harlem crowds, “until you start realising the connection with the Congo.” The curious connection between Black Americans’ fight for civil rights and the second-largest country in Africa is the subject of Johan Grimonprez’s documentary.

Early on, his film quotes political philosopher Frantz Fanon: “Africa is shaped like a gun, and the Congo is its trigger.” Described thus, the Congo doesn’t sound a peaceful place. “It isn’t,” says Grimonprez. “The Congo was long raped and plundered for its raw materials. It still is. You wouldn’t have your Teslas or your iPhones without raw material from the Congo.

“And I don’t mean rape just metaphorically. If you made a map of the east Congo showing where the mining is and the statistics of how many women are raped, it’s a one-on-one correlation.”

His film juxtaposes the racist lynchings and de facto apartheid of southern American states such as Mississippi in the 1960s with the contemporary assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically elected, Black African post-colonial prime minister. His film reveals how Lumumba was toppled in a military coup aided – either actively or through docile complaisance – by the CIA, MI6, 20,000 supposed peacekeepers deployed by UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, freebooting mercenaries like “Mad Mike” Hoare and, finally, Belgium, whose secret service worked with white colonists desperate to retain their African assets.






















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