“If Africa is shaped like a revolver, then the Congo is the trigger.” Frantz Fanon, the well-known philosopher of revolutionary decolonization, signs a phrase that fits very well with the spirit of Soundtrack to a Coup d’Étatone of the documentaries that can be seen at this year’s event of In-Edit, the international documentary film festival focused on music.
The film, directed by Belgian Johan Grimonprez, recovers the spirit of noir and the so-called cinema polar French, loaded with plots, spies, understandings and twists in history. Only this time the viewer is sitting before the dry truth of the facts. The common thread is the process of independence from the enormous and rich —uranium, cobalt, coltan— Congo territory, first of the crown of Belgium, and then of the American interests of the Eisenhower administration in the middle of the last century.
The particularity that keeps us glued to the story for two and a half hours – with the merit that this has today – is that this is a story told through sax phrasing, piano keys and drumsticks, bringing out the shine of the Charles. A thriller with a jazz soundtrack, with a montage that does not let up, a work that once again puts music in a place of relevance on the big screen. Soundtrack to a Coup d’État It places us at a time when something was happening that seems very distant to us today: there was a feeling that the world could radically change. For the better, in a sense of reorganization of social justice both in international geopolitics and in the living conditions of the populations of each country.
An era in which, particularly, and this is another palpable difference with our time, the planet seemed to look at Africa. In fact, 1960, the year in which the documentary focuses, is key in decolonization, since up to ten countries, including Ivory Coast, Mali, Senegal and the Congo itself, declared their independence. Dreams were born such as promoting the creation of a Union of African States, a concept already verbalized by the black liberation ideologue Marcus Garvey several decades ago. It was a continental federation promoted by the Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah, followed by the Guinean and Malian governments and in which Patrice Lumumba was invited to participate.
Lumumba is the prominent protagonist of this choral story. An unexpected leader for Western public opinion, he had been born when his country was not that it was still free, it was that it was the private property of the Belgian King Leopold II. The recent review of that period of death, repression and exploitation of resources has led to the removal of some statues of the monarch in cities like Antwerp. The Congolese capital, later Kinshasa, was called Leopoldville when Lumumba won the elections and independence was proclaimed. From there the events develop like a torrent. Soundtrack to a Coup d’État It deals with a dizzying pace that does not let up, in line with what they also gave to Lumumba.
The film also does not give up presenting hard facts with a certain poetry, combining references from official documents with literary quotes. Grimonprez illuminates those corners of History shamefully forgotten by the West, and thus the viewer will be able, for example, to learn about the figure of Andrée Blouin, activist, chief of protocol and author of Lumumba’s speeches, in addition to the international liaison of the emerging new Congo. She was, to no one’s surprise, vilified in the most misogynistic ways by her detractors. His best-known nickname, and the one with which he even titled his autobiography, was more proud: the black Passiflora.
Episodes such as the segregation in the form of a Belgian puppet state of the Congolese territory of Katanga, controlled by the Union Minière of the European country, also pass through our eyes. Or the nationalization of the Suez Canal by President Gamal Abdel Nasser after the Israeli invasion of Egypt. Also the role of the Non-Aligned Movement under the leadership of Egyptians, Indonesians, Indians and Yugoslavs. Finally, we will see the iconic images of Fidel Castro’s participation in the United Nations General Assembly in 1960, when the Cuban leader stayed and chatted with Malcolm X at the Theresa Hotel in Harlem and praised Lumumba, who was banned from traveling. to New York.
And all of this is riddled with little-known details, such as the fact that Louis Armstrong was a bit of a Trojan horse for the CIA in Africa, performing in the ghostly Katanga on a tour paid for by the State Department. Soundtrack to a Coup d’État is exquisitely balanced between the hard and the soft politics. Music matters a lot here. We learn that the Congo had its own rumba hit in the Lingala language months before its self-determination and that the song, Independence Cha Chasounded loud in neighboring countries busy in the same fight.
But above all, the most exciting jazz that has ever been made rules here. This is equivalent to saying Dizzy Gillespie and his overwhelming personality, Ornette Coleman flying free, the mystique of John Coltrane, the depth through which Nina Simone walks us or the torn lament of Abbey Lincoln belonging to that suite teacher that is his album with Max Roach We Insist!. Listening to it is still as shocking as the protest that Lincoln herself organized with Maya Angelou at the United Nations just a month after Lumumba’s assassination. Those cries survive to this day.
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