REVIEW: Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat [2024]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 150 minutes
Release Date: November 1st, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Kino Lorber
Director(s): Johan Grimonprez
Writer(s): Johan Grimonprez

In life one should never remain silent. Never.

Since the Eisenhower administration used jazz performers like Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong as a smokescreen to infiltrate Africa for their own nefarious interests (labeling them “ambassadors” and selling them as evidence of a “free nation” in contrast to so-called communist leanings via de-colonization), Johan Grimonprez seeks to reclaim their music by using it as a soundtrack to the truth of that time instead. Because as Malcolm X orates, Black Americans were citizens without citizenship. They were prisoners to a system that sought to pretend like it cared about African rights despite the hypocrisy because all it really craved was access to the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s crucial mineral deposits.

So did the rest of Europe. Especially Belgium, the country that “agreed” to give the DRC independence … after first privatizing its most profitable mine and covertly installing its own people in new Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba’s cabinet. Everything that follows is therefore the collusion of world powers undermining their front-facing efforts to give Africa back to Africans by ensuring it gets accomplished on their terms. Cue the assassination plots. Cue the coups. Cue the subtle nudges necessary for intelligence officers to keep their hands clean while getting these countries to do all the dirty work themselves. If Lumumba is too popular and smart to play ball, they’ll back President Joseph Kasa Vubu instead. And, just in case, they’ll activate General Joseph-Désiré Mobutu too.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat lays it all out in enthralling fashion via the words of those involved. We hear from Lumumba’s close advisor Andrée Blouin’s personal papers. There’s Nikita Khrushchev’s recorded diaries. Novelist In Koli Jean Bofane reads from his novel and provides a first-hand account of his own harrowing experience. And Irish diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien rounds things out with insight into what went on during those first seven months of DRC independence. Add the music (Simone, Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and the duo of Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach, who protested at the UN with Maya Angelou after Lumumba’s inevitable death), speeches (Malcolm X and many United Nations ambassadors), and archival interviews (including CIA Director Allen Dulles) and Grimonprez has every angle covered.

It plays as a rousing history lesson the likes of which we may not see any more considering all the stories of teachers dealing with students using generative AI as a search engine to fabricate bespoke wrong answers to their questions. The way Grimonprez weaves it all together with evidence of just how deep America, Belgium (his homeland), the USSR, and others were in this neocolonial period is enlightening. His ability to also keep it kinetic with the jazz backdrop, damning text quotes, and visual callbacks for two-and-a-half hours is impressive. He takes us back a couple years before DRC independence to set the stage in Africa and the UN, lets Lumumba win us over with an unwavering dedication to his people, and simply allows Eisenhower, et al. to villainize themselves.

And despite the DRC being the focus with the whole bookmarked by Lincoln and Angelou’s coordinated crashing of the UN Security Council, the story is so much bigger than one country. It’s why Grimonprez consistently goes back to archival footage talking about the DRC being the “key to Africa” and why he splices in a Tesla and Apple commercial to remind us of the reason. Between Egypt nationalizing the Suez Canal and Ghana and Guinea working towards building a United States of Africa, Lumumba’s potential to actually make the DRC into a world power by keeping its vast wealth for itself was a bridge too far (and the bridge the West could detonate without much fallout). Cue the interviews with mercenaries. Cue the poison ice dart. Cue the smug smiles and “no comments.” Peace does not pay.