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 30^th. 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.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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