Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat review – a sprawling geopolitical tapestry

1960 has been described as The Year of Africa, as a wave of political change spread across the continent and led to 17 nations declaring independence. Among the most contentious of these was the case of the Congo, which announced its determination to emerge as a free nation under the leadership of the charismatic Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba on June 30th. Three days before losing control of its colony, Belgium privatised the Union Minière mine, the prime source of the country’s enormous potential wealth, and within seven months Lumumba would be assassinated following a Belgium-backed coup d’état. So much for independence.

Lumumba’s tragic story has been told before, notably by Raoul Peck in his 1990 documentary Lumumba: Death of a Prophet, but Johan Grimonprez brilliantly weaves Lumumba into a sprawling geopolitical tapestry in Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. The Belgian filmmaker doesn’t shy away from critiquing his own country’s role in the Congolese crisis, but he also details the myriad ways in which the United States exerted its pernicious influence in the region, with the rise of the leftist Lumumba exacerbating their Cold War paranoia; after all, more than 3,000 tonnes of the uranium used to create the first atomic bomb were mined in the Congo.

To make moves in Africa, the Americans needed a smokescreen, and the most fascinating strand of Grimonprez’s film shows how many of the greatest jazz musicians of the era – Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone, et al – were often used as unwitting stooges in CIA operations.

This musical angle ensures the film bounces along to a vibrant, eclectic score, but it also helps Grimonprez organise and structure the enormous wealth of archive footage, soundbites and quotations that that he uses to tell this complex story. The director and his editor Rik Chaubet allow the music to dictate the rhythm of the sequences that they cut together; one passage of the film might be energised by the aggressive drumming of Max Roach, while another unfolds against the slow, resonant build of Abbey Lincoln’s defiant vocals. Roach and Lincoln were among the activists who stormed the United Nations in 1961 to protest the killing of Lumumba, an extraordinary incident that Grimonprez uses to bookend his film.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a dense and meticulously constructed picture. Grimonprez packs a daunting amount of detail and incident into 150 minutes while encouraging viewers to dig even deeper into these events, with the source of every quotation and fact being cited on screen. But if that description makes the film sound like homework, the kind of history lesson one should approach dutifully rather than with keen anticipation, then it’s a misrepresentation of what watching it actually feels like.

On a moment-by-moment basis, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is as exhilarating and illuminating a history lesson as you’ll ever have, and Grimonprez’s inclusion of adverts for Tesla or Apple products – both reliant on materials extracted from the Congo – reminds us that we are living with the consequences of this history every single day.

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