In January, half of the UNIS Tutorial house was given the opportunity to watch the Oscar nominated Documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, by filmmaker Johan Grimonprez. The film explains how a series of events and individuals led to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s first democratically elected leader, in 1961.
The involvement of jazz ambassadors, such as Louis Armstrong, particularly fascinated me with this documentary. Armstrong was on a tour of Africa at the time, and he – like other black jazz musicians at the time – was sent by the United States to newly independent African countries to improve America’s image, existing as a symbol of American goodwill and freedom. This was also incredibly contradictory, seeing as African Americans were still being denied basic civil rights in the US during the 1960s.
The US almost always sent their jazz ambassadors to perform somewhere right before a coup took place in the country, such as sending Duke Ellington to perform in Iraq in 1963–the same year as the coup–or shipping Dizzy Gillespie to Syria in 1956.
Armstrong was not directly implicated in Lumumba’s assassination, and the role he played was even unknown to him at the time. In an article from The Guardian, written in 2021, author and research fellow at London University’s School of Advanced Study Susan Williams described Armstrong’s role in Lumumba’s assassination as that of an unwitting “Trojan Horse.”
Armstrong’s tour was used to cover the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) involvement in the assassination of Lumumba, who they wanted to kill out of fear that he would lead Congo to soviet communism.
Grimonprez, the film’s director, explained the link between Armstrong’s tour through Congo and the CIA’s involvement in the coup nonlinearly, jumping back and forth between Armstrong’s performances and important details about the coup, such as Lumumba being under house arrest.
As Grimonprez explained in response to a question during his Q and A at UNIS and to Variety, “Music is an actor of this global story.” The songs were not chosen at random, and Armstrong is just one example of this. The American jazz artists Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach also appear multiple times during the movie, performing excerpts from their album “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite” from 1960, which was inspired by African independence movements at the time.
Musical inclusion in the film took a cue from Soundtrack for a Revolution, a musical released in 2010 that explores music's influence on the civil rights movement. It tells the story of the movement through freedom songs, with roots from black churches and the labor movement, that protesters sang at mass meetings, picket lines, police wagons, and jail cells.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat used music to combine the experiences of a history lesson and a jazz concert to remain interesting–even though it relied almost entirely on archival excerpts–this clever combination encourages the audience to look beyond the exterior of political conflict.
