‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’ Review: The Rumble of Jazz and Politics in the Global South

“The Belgians cut off my hands in the Congo,” Langston Hughes wrote in his poem “Negro.” “They lynch me now in Texas.” The year was 1922, and racial segregation was the norm in the United States. Anti-Black racism in the South was such a millstone that the U.S. Senate failed to pass an NAACP-sponsored anti-lynching bill in January of that year, a list of simple protections that was prevented from coming to a vote due to filibusters.

Hughes’s poem is one piece of ephemera that comprises the massive tapestry that is Soundtrack to a Coup d’État. Director Johan Grimonprez’s documentary is primarily focused on the Democratic Republic of Congo and its struggle for independence from Belgian colonialism, during which time our government was using Black jazz musicians to, in its diplomatic tango with the Soviet Union, paint a portrait of American liberalism as benevolent.

The documentary focuses on the decade of 1955 to 1965, tracing the Congo’s secession from Belgium as well as its post-colonial violence, in which the nation’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was repeatedly attacked and eventually assassinated by the C.I.A. As successful as Grimponprez is at laying out this bloody road map to a targeted killing, his even greater success may be the way that he takes aim at Western sanctimony, and by tying American and European imperialism with the whitewashing of the subjugation of the Black population in the States.

Together with editor Rik Chaubet, Grimonprez weaves together academic analysis, archival footage, performed readings of works by Andrée Blouin, In Koli Jean Bofane, and Conor Cruise O’Brien, as well as audio recordings of Nikita Khrushchev’s memoir, all of which is interlaced with studio sessions and television appearances by Malcolm X, Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Nina Simone, and others, all the while providing pull quotes and interviews in consistently surprising ways.

The end result is something like jazz. While generally adhering to a chronology of the Congolese resistance to the game of tug of war between the United States and the Soviet Union, the film more loosely stitches together a variety of media to fashion a stunning screed against colonial racism and state-sanctioned violence that reaches far beyond the years it directly covers.

That layering allows Grimonprez to link Malcolm X’s charges against racial double standards, for example, with Lumumba’s rattling of the colonial cage. Some footage and quotes are repeated with increased contextualization. Like pieces of music we return to again and again, the repetition discombobulates preconceived notions of villains and heroes, complicating a historiographical tendency to consider the global south an enemy and America benevolent.

To be sure, the film’s subject is enormous. Between the Cold War, the proliferation of jazz, the wave of African post-colonial independence of the early 1960s, C.I.A.-backed coups, back-door politicking of the United Nations, and anti-Black racism and murders in the American South, Grimonprez’s film constantly risks collapsing under its own weight. The film is locked in tension between wanting to be a formalist experiment with jazz as its drumbeat and the massive historical web it wants to spin. Sometimes much of that tension means that its various intentions can’t coexist. For one thing, the link of liberatory music to liberatory politics—and the weaponization of the former by the U.S. government to obscure the latter abroad—is enticing, yet never quite made indelible enough across the film’s somewhat bloated runtime.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’État is, perhaps, most effective in its repurposing of archival footage and audio, collapsing time and space in ways that make us more attuned to the perpetuity of post-colonial struggle. Sometimes this manifests in cheeky ways, as in a sequence covering the 1955 Bandung conference of 29 Asian and African countries, wherein particularly incendiary and anti-colonial speeches are cross-cut with footage of applauding white and Western leaders captured at a different event. In one sequence, Khrushchev’s tour of the U.S. with President Eisenhower is accompanied by “I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You)” as sung by Louis Armstrong, a montage of musical irony that suggests that, even in times of intense diplomacy, colonial powers are in bed together, jointly profiteering off of the backs of the global south.

At a couple points in the documentary, Grimonprez jarringly cuts to contemporary commercials for brands such as Apple and Tesla, as if to suggest the reasons for the West’s continued involvement in uranium-rich countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo. “If Africa is shaped like a revolver,” Frantz Fanon famously wrote in the 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, “then Congo is its trigger.” After the wave of post-colonial independence, Africa’s trigger is still being pulled, its resources and its people under continuous exploitation. As Soundtrack to a Coup d’État brutally suggests, history is not in the past, but very much alive in our present.