words Paul Risker
Belgian storyteller, academic and curator Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a 150-minute-deep dive into history. It specifically explores the moment when the US State Department used jazz musician Louis Armstrong as a decoy in the CIA-backed plot to overthrow Congolese Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat brings together memoirs, rarely seen archival footage and personal home movies, to reveal part of the Cold War story. Grimonprez explores the US State Department backed “jazz ambassador” project, a soft diplomacy tactic, with political manoeuvring to suffocate the hopes of African nationalism. The intent was to ensure the new Afro-Asian Bloc within the UN wouldn’t disturb the delicate status quo favoured by America and her allies. However, when Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union for military aid after his request was rejected by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the CIA were instructed to remove Lumumba, who was a key voice in the drive for African nationalism, from power. Lumumba, was assassinated near Élisabethville, Katanga, in January 1961.
Grimonprez’s previous work includes the 1997 documentary, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, which he describes as a deconstruction of mainstream media, including television. Interspersed with readings from American author, playwright and essayist Don DeLillo’s novels, the film explores the history of plane hijacking in a political context. Grimonprez describes his 1999 Hitchcock doppelgänger film, Double Take, as being about the rise of the culture of fear in television, which he calls, “the fear box at the beginning of the 60s.” In 2016, he directed the documentary, Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade.
In conversation with Flux, Grimonprez discussed how the integrity of history has been compromised, and the untold stories are waiting to reveal themselves to anyone willing to look deep enough. He also reflected on the dual uses of art and culture, Ireland’s peculiar history and creating a forum for voices other than his own.
In our introductory conversation, I noticed you chose to describe yourself as a storyteller, rather than a filmmaker or director.
We’re all trying to understand why we’re here, and so we’re all storytellers in our own lives. And for me, that’s the essence of exploring whatever the medium is, whether it’s art or cinema, my teaching or my curating. It’s always about trying to seek and explore, and to question those boundaries. Yesterday, I quoted Voltaire who said, “History is the common lie we agree upon.” I think to dismantle that is crucial, and so maybe that’s how I would define my work in a nutshell.
Do schools teach nuanced points of view, or do they teach this lie we agree upon?
Right, or it’s society suffering from historical amnesia. History is constantly in flux and the world moves on. When I made Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, which is about airplane hijackings, the airplane questions the notion of a nation state—it’s always in a state of being in-between. Leila Khaled hijacks a TWA plane and flies over Haifa where she used to live and where she saw a friend shot in the street, so she relabels the plane as the independent State of Palestine.
If I look at history, it’s about rewriting and relabelling. It’s about being in that state of in-betweenness, where you’re in this transitional zone trying to make sense of where you stand with all these different factors that define the world.
Everything is political, including the school playground and places of work. It can feel claustrophobic sometimes because it’s difficult to create a non-political space. We’re also living politicised lives from a young age.
When Harry met Sally, and they kissed, they said, “Every kiss is political.” Every intimate space is sort of placed in a bigger world situation. This can also be said about the film—there are these home movies and very intimate stories. History is anchored by very intimate relationships to what’s happening in the bigger picture.
That’s how the juxtaposition happens within the film, but when it comes to history, there’s a lot of stuff that I had to uncover in the making of this film that I didn’t learn at school. It was all swept under the carpet, like how [Patrice] Lumumba was labelled a communist, but he wasn’t—he was a sovereign statesman. It’s sovereignty and standing up for your own rights that are at stake, and we didn’t learn that at school in Belgium.
Take me inside the research process and how you chose to construct Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat?
It’s interesting to juxtapose through the vertical layers of a film, but then, the narration is done horizontally in a kaleidoscopic way, through different narrators. I wouldn’t use a narration of my own. Instead, it was inviting other people to guide you, for example, Andrée Blouin, the Pan Africanist freedom fighter, whose memoirs and home movies we had access to, and Koli Jean Bofane, the Congolese novelist. He has a peculiar history because he and his mom were kidnapped by a Belgian rubber baron, who she was forced to marry.
Again, it’s another perspective to enter the film through the Congo, where the conflict minerals for all the major wars in the Twentieth Century and on to today, have come from there. Bofane says, “Congo just delivers but never benefits from it.” It’s like what Kwame Nkrumah said, “Africa is not poor, it’s the Africans that are poor.” So, the whole kleptocracy is sucking the whole continent dry.
Conor Cruise O’Brien is an interesting character. He was the Irish Representative to the United Nations at that time [of Lumumba’s assassination] and he was able to expose the arm twisters. So, you have the Irish perspective in the UN, which is peculiar, because it’s not like Ireland is a major power, and it also has a peculiar history with the UK.
Then, the fourth person is the point of view of [Nikita] Khrushchev. When he was overthrown by [Leonid] Brezhnev in 1964 and exiled, he was recording his memoirs, and his son, the late Sergei Khrushchev, was trying to get those out. The CIA published them in the 70s for the first time. Sergei died during the making of this film, but he sent us all the digital recordings as well as the home movies of his dad. And of course, you have Malcolm X, but you also have another entry point, where the music becomes a protagonist as an historical agent, and that’s quite crucial for me.
So, you have all these different perspectives to enter this pivotal moment in history, in a kaleidoscopic way. It’s a moment when things are going to flip, and in which, my Belgium had a huge stake in smothering that sense of hope for the [African] independence movement, and using Lumumba’s murder to see how the west would deal with that.
When it comes specifically to the archives, the African museum was a part of Belgian television. There were the John Coltrane Concerts, and the Max Roach Quartet and Abbey Lincoln performed the album, We Insist! We Insist! In its entirety on Belgian television. It was remarkable to find, and when this was broadcast in 1964, the genocide was already happening in East Congo. To have an album that is inspired by the African independence movement, and at the same time have that flip side, is the film’s vertical layering.
If you research deep enough, you find stories that haven’t been told in history, like Andrée Blouin’s story. As a woman, she was written out of history. In books, I’ve found notes that label her as a “communist”, a “witch” or a “prostitute”, by being in bed with the state leaders of the independent African nations. None of that was true, but I thought this would interesting to explore, so I got in touch with her daughter, and we got access to her memoirs. I thought, ‘Let’s give the forum to those people in history.’
Ireland has an interesting history, and it can have a point of view unlike other European colonial powers, because of its complicated history with the UK. On the world stage, as you say, Ireland may not be a superpower, but it can empathise in a way other countries cannot.
Maybe that’s why they have good writers, because they have a distance from their own identity, which allows you to question. Or, if you’ve been displaced, it maybe gives rise to the way you deal with narration and storytelling in a very different way.
All of Ireland was oak forest, and it was used to make ships for imperialising the rest of the world. Then, it was the textile industry that took over. I don’t know if you know the book by Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, and this is a whole other story, but it’s something I teach. The textile industry was appropriately called “The Common Grounds of the Irish” and so that led to a whole poor class. During the Potato Famine, people left for the United States, or they gathered in the cities, and that became the proletarian class to exploit. It’s an interesting book, and he focuses on the textile industry—after the trees are cut, the sheep move in.
Everything bleeds into something else.
It’s all connected. There were a lot of Irish slaves in the transatlantic passage that is not known about. Ireland has a peculiar history, and even when I made Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, the relationship to Palestine. Always being the underdog itself, Ireland has an empathy with the underdog, and O’Brien fits that situation. When he was in Katanga, as the Secretary-General’s representative [1961-62], he exposed the genocide by the Belgians on the [indigenous] Baluba. This was an eye-opener for me.
Of course, he’s a very controversial figure, but I don’t zoom in on that. When he was in Katanga, he criticised the United Nations terribly from the inside—exposing arm twisters. It’s something I did not know, but it was confirmed by the audio we found at Columbia University.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat explores how art and culture can be both subversive and used by the status quo. It’s defined by competing political interests that are all connected.
And it happened with the abstract expressionists, right? The CIA were paying for all these big exhibitions in Europe. So, the big modernists were paid for by the CIA, and it’s not dissimilar with the jazz ambassadors.
When Louis Armstrong is sent to the Congo [in October 1960], he’s a decoy for the overthrow of Lumumba. The assassination is already being plotted. Sidney Gottlieb, who was the head of the chemical department at the CIA, arrived in the Congo on the 23rd of September 1960 and met the CIA Station Chief, Larry Devlin.
That’s not to say that those jazz ambassadors were passive instruments. Louis Armstrong, on his Africa tour, refused to go play for an apartheid audience in South Africa, and he would change his lyrics to Black & Blue. When he sings, “I’m white inside” he changes the lyrics in a very subtle way to, “I’m right inside.” And afterward he says he knew he was being used, and he really got upset. He said he was going to resign his American citizenship and move to Ghana. He didn’t, but when he visited Ghana, he had a huge connection and thought his ancestors might have come from there.
And then there’s Armstrong’s concert—100,00 people listening to Black & Blue. But it’s not that he was a passive instrument, nor was Dizzy Gillespie who said, “I wasn’t going over there to sugarcoat segregation back at home.” But it’s true, art can be like Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach or Maya Angelou, and like the woman’s college in Harlem. They actually were the one instigating that protest at the United Nations. It was artists and musicians that started that and stood up and shouted when Lumumba’s murder was announced by [Ambassador] Stevenson. So, you see, the musicians had that political agency, but they could also be used as a propaganda tool. There are many layers to how the music is contextualised in the film.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is available now on the BFI Player and will be released on TVOD on 30th December. It has been shortlisted for the Best Feature Documentary Academy Award.
