“Rhythm is my business.” — Dizzy Gillespie
History often turns out to be far more bizarre than any conspiracy theory, as the predatory forces operating in humankind have shown themselves to be mostly opportunistic rather than strategic — possessing a randomness that actually makes them successful, as they readily adapt to swiftly changing circumstances, insidiously creating desired outcomes.
If there is any other consistency in the entire timeline of our presence on this planet, it is that power, territory and wealth once forcibly taken is rarely relinquished without a substantial and prolonged confrontation. This is further burdened by the bitter truth that amongst the downtrodden there always will be people willing to do absolutely anything for money (i.e. betray their kin) — which then favours the groups already holding resources. They can continue to facilitate atrocities incognito, while proclaiming one’s avarice as patronage, in the footsteps of the racist delusion of colonial conquest as “civilisation building”, that persists in some quarters in the West to this day.
This was, and still is, the gist of (neo)colonialist presence in Africa — Earth’s most bountiful and most ravaged continent.
In telling this meta-tale through the example of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez‘s maverick, brilliant, complex Oscar-nominated doc Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (2024) has a few narrative tricks up its sleeve and multiple historical tracks it mixes meticulously (in their natural rhythm), mashing them up for maximum effect (editor, Rik Chaubet, visual effects Blaise Jadoul). A dizzying experience, causing a sense of disorientation in space and time for the viewer, until one’s brain adapts to the way editing and source material is used as jazz improv (with an endless best of soundtrack). As a free-style cinematic experiment (written by Grimonprez and Daan Milius), it is a wild ride towards the end of the long winding road that led to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of DRC, and the world-wide protests that ensued — an inspired detective-like piecing-together of a painful, chronologically shredded historical trajectory that might have been too ambitious (or impossible) to cover without the cleverly devised bebop shortcuts.
In a fundamental way the doc’s score is the story, because jazz itself has more than a little to do with the military coup(s) in question. It proposes that at the crescendo of the Cold War, Allen Dulles’ CIA of the 1960s would allegedly (and nonchalantly), and on behest of the then sitting president Dwight D. Eisenhower, send US jazz musicians of African-American heritage as ambassadors in concert tours across Africa, and sometimes use them as decoy for its agents to plot and overthrow newly democratically elected governments — -particularly ones leaning towards socialism, and by extension, Moscow. In the case of what was formerly (and bloodily) the Belgian Congo, it was the sainted Satchmo, himself — Louis Armstrong, that had been in this way duped.
Another beat the story follows is the thumping of USSR’s Nikita Khrushchev’s shoe at the UN, and the hazy role of the UN peace-keeping force in the Congo (and its Secratary-General Dag Hammarskjöld), in the still-disputed infamous October 1960 show-banging incident, in which a spirited Khrushchev stormed against imperialism and colonial powers, and the influence they wield over the UN, only weeks after submitting to the UN the Declaration on the Grant of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which, in effect, marked the end of Western colonialism (on paper) when it was voted in almost unanimously in December of the same year (colonials, plus the US, abstained).
Other threads and copious amounts of rare footage, tapes and explosive interviews trace the origins of Pan-Africanism/African nationalism, the African freedom movement, admittance of the new nations in the UN, the forming of the Non-aligned Movement, Malcom X’s political influence, his hosting Fidel Castro in Harlem (joined by Khrushchev, one fine night), the Civil Rights movement in the US, and the role such cultural icons as Maya Angelou, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln had in the protest staged in the UN to voice outrage at Lumumba’s kidnapping and murder, the intermediary work of the inspiring socialist activist Andrée Blouin in shaping DRC politics, the clandestine workings of the CIA and MI6 in sowing discord in the population, poisoning the independent chalice of newly declared free African nations, Moise Tshombe’s Katanga secession 11 days after Congo achieved independence from Belgium (as colonial retaliation), the bloody operations of sundry mercenaries under and after Belgian colonial rule, some of which were openly Nazi-affiliated, the dark encompassing presence of the Belgian mining company Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, and finally, and most importantly the continued tragic fate of the Congolese people, who, failing to uphold Lumumba in power (through rebel forces), subsequently had been crushed by endless war, infectious disease, abject poverty, and home-grown despots, despite their own country being perhaps the most resource-rich territory in the world (see “the resource curse”).
In its precisely calibrated, highly aestheticised, thoroughly moving tempo towards a dire conclusion (inserting ads for Tesla and Apple, to prove a point), amidst the flurry of images, quotes and clips, this doc clears up historical issues in ways one could have not even imagined, and stuns its viewer by its sharp, bulls-eye accuracy.
A one-of-a-kind experience.
★★★★★
Author: ©Milana Vujkov
Lola On Film 