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 Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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
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.
The film centers on the "Congo Crisis" (1960–1961), a pivotal moment in history where the struggle for African self-determination collided with the global interests of the United States, Belgium, and the Soviet Union.
The Resource War: The film highlights how the Congo’s vast mineral wealth—specifically uranium needed for the U.S. nuclear program—made it a high-stakes battlefield.
The Coup: It details how Belgium and the CIA orchestrated the overthrow and eventual execution of Lumumba, viewing his Pan-Africanism and perceived ties to the Soviet Union as a threat to Western hegemony.
The UN Connection: The documentary examines the role of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and the organization's complicity (or failure) in protecting Lumumba's sovereignty.
The Role of "Jazz Diplomacy"
The "Soundtrack" in the title refers to a fascinating and cynical historical tactic: the U.S. State Department’s use of African American jazz legends as "Cultural Ambassadors."
The Smokescreen: The U.S. sent icons like Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Nina Simone on tours across Africa.
The Paradox: These musicians were dispatched to promote American "democracy" and "freedom" abroad while they were still being treated as second-class citizens under Jim Crow laws at home.
The Deception: The film reveals that these tours were often used as a cover for CIA operations. Louis Armstrong, for instance, was sent to the Congo at the very moment the coup against Lumumba was being finalized, unwittingly serving as a distraction.
Jazz as Resistance
While the State Department tried to weaponize jazz, the film also highlights how the musicians themselves fought back through their art and activism.
Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach: A centerpiece of the film is the February 1961 protest where singer Abbey Lincoln and drummer Max Roach (authors of the We Insist! Freedom Now Suite) crashed the UN Security Council to denounce Lumumba’s murder.
The Music as Weapon: The film uses the frantic, improvisational nature of jazz to mirror the political chaos of the era. The soundtrack includes works by John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Eric Dolphy, and Miriam Makeba, framing their music as a radical language of liberation.
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