Review: 'Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat' recounts the rocky road to independence for African countries, and the Cold War games the U.S. played there

Belgian director Johan Grimonprez’ documentary “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” is a rich account of a violent history that most Americans have likely forgot — which is a shame, since American tax dollars, funneled through the CIA, financed a lot of it.

It’s also a history that’s punctuated by American jazz music, as some notable musicians protested the violence, while others toured Africa on goodwill tours — usually not knowing that the tours were paid for by CIA front groups.

The key date in the action is June 30, 1960, the day the Republic of the Congo (now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo) officially became independent of its colonizers, Belgium. The key figure here is Patrice Lumumba, who became the country’s first prime minister shortly before his 35th birthday, and was deposed in a military coup led by Col. Mobutu Sese Seko a few months later — and killed by a firing squad the following January. 

Grimonprez, using archival footage and readings of memoirs and letters from several people in the thick of it, captures the backstory of how Lumumba rose to prominence — starting with the influence of Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah, who oversaw the independence movement of his country three years earlier, and launched the Pan-African movement, which encouraged independence from colonizers across the continent. 

The West, particularly the United States, saw the growing independence movement across Africa through a Cold War lens. The reasoning went that if these new African nations were against their former oppressors — the United Kingdom, France and Belgium, all America’s allies — they could easily side with the Communist regimes of the USSR and China. And in the brutal calculus of men like John Foster Dulles, President Dwight Eisenhower’s CIA chief, installing a dictator who was on the American side was better than allowing a democratically elected leader like Lumumba to rule. That’s how Mubuto came to lead that country, which he renamed Zaire, ruthlessly from 1965 to his death in 1997.

The United States didn’t do much to win Lumumba over, as the movie tells it. The U.S. government did give Lumumba official lodging on his one trip to D.C. — even letting him sleep on a bed that Belgium’s King Leopold II once slept in, something the Belgians didn’t like one bit. But Eisenhower canceled a meeting with Lumumba, the movie tells us, opting instead to play a round of golf. 

The other government entity with a role here — besides Eisenhower’s White House and Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union — was the United Nations. In the U.N.’s General Assembly, a coalition of African and Asian nations formed a powerful voting bloc, passing resolutions against the European countries that used to control their territories. At the urging of members, the U.N.’s secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, sent peacekeeping troops to keep Lumumba’s government in place as Belgian forces worked to oust the newly independent government.

Grimonprez also features archived interviews with some of the spies who worked out of Congo back in the day, in which they hint at war crimes before coyly backing away from any such suggestion. Through those interviews, and the documents unearthed years after the fact, a clear narrative emerges that the American government, their European allies and various economic interests – including a major mining company that aimed to profit from Congo’s reserves of uranium — thought Lumumba was a hindrance to their plans.

Setting this to the jazz music of the day — with footage of such greats as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln (who led a protest within U.N. headquarters) — the movie builds a furious tension, while also highlighting the American racial divide that informed many of the U.S. government’s decisions.

Grimonprez packs a lot into “Soundtrack of a Coup d’Etat,” which clocks in at two-and-a-half hours and feels like it could have gone on much longer. The result is a powerful history lesson, set to a strong beat.

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‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 28, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for war footage and language. Running time: 150 minutes; in Dutch, Russian, French, Arabic and English, with subtitles.