free jazz
a review of soundtrack to a coup d'état (2024)
Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (2024), dir. Johan Grimonprez — ★★★★★
Last June, when browsing the events calendar on the National Gallery of Art’s website, I came across a screening for a film called Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, which had been released earlier that year and which was showing as part of the DC/DOX documentary film festival. I’d never heard of the film before, but the description on the museum’s website sounded like it had been designed in a lab specifically for me:
In 1960, at the United Nations: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe denouncing America’s color bar, while the US dispatches jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to the Congo. Johan Grimonprez’s new essay film invokes African American jazz music to animate a rich fabric of griot texts, eyewitness accounts, official government memos, and testimonies from CIA operatives. It shines light on how the Belgian monarchy, the US government, and multinational corporations used art institutions and legendary jazz musicians as cover for covert operations against Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba.
I sent the link to my best friend, asking whether she’d like to go see it with me, and we made plans to attend the showing together. Unfortunately, she ended up being scheduled to work that day, and in the end I stayed home—a decision that I would come to sorely regret. Over the next several months, as acclaim and accolades for the film (including an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature) continued to pile up, I looked on enviously as screenings were announced at independent venues in other cities across the country—everywhere, it seemed, but Washington, D.C. Friends and coworkers who were lucky enough to catch showings waxed poetic to me about how incredible the film was, how perfectly aligned it was with my own interests in Third Worldism and decolonization, how urgently I needed to go see it as soon as I got the chance. So when I learned that the Avalon Theatre in Chevy Chase was showing the film for one night only last Wednesday, I immediately texted the friend whom I was planning to have over for drinks that night, to ask whether they’d be interested in a change of plans. Thankfully, they were.
• • •
Unlike many documentaries, Soundtrack to a Coup d’État does not, strictly speaking, have a ‘plot’ as such. The film’s main central throughline is the 1960 U.S.- and Belgian-orchestrated overthrow of Patrice Lumumba, the democratically-elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then called the Republic of the Congo), and his replacement by the brutal Western-backed dictator Joseph-Désiré Mobutu. This throughline, however, is accompanied by a simultaneous exploration of two other distinct but related phenomena: the Third Worldist and Non-Aligned movements that were sweeping the Global South at the time, and the CIA and State Department’s embrace of so-called ‘jazz diplomacy’ as a tool of soft power projection during the Cold War. These different threads, simultaneously distinct and interrelated, are woven together in a way that is as technically masterful as it is stylistically ambitious. Clips of performances by jazz giants such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Dizzy Gillespie are spliced together with footage from the Bandung Conference and the United Nations General Assembly, cleverly edited so that the audience’s applause fades into cheers for Kwame Nkrumah and Fidel Castro’s speeches while Nikita Khrushchev bangs his fist on his desk in time to the beat of Max Roach’s drums.
The result is a rich, impressionistic tapestry of dizzying scope and ambition, spanning a full two and a half hours and yet still only scratching the surface of its subject matter. (In a September 2024 interview with Filmmaker Magazine, director Johan Grimonprez revealed that the film’s original runtime was four hours.) Constructed entirely from archival footage, without a shred of voice-over narration or firsthand camerawork, each moment in the film only reinforces the indelible impression that the vault of history has suddenly been thrown open and you, the viewer, have been invited to peer at the horrors that lie hidden inside.
To anyone who has even a basic familiarity with the history of U.S. imperialism, of course, nothing in the film will come as a surprise. But surprise is not the same thing as shock, and there is something to be said about the unique psychic horror of watching a crime as grotesque and world-historical as the overthrow of Lumumba play out in front of your eyes, projected onto a twenty-foot-tall theater screen in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of the capital city of the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. The shock and outrage that the film inevitably engenders in the viewer is only compounded by the knowledge that what you are watching is just the tip of the imperialist iceberg—that not only did the worst atrocities of the Congolese coup occur when there were no cameras around to record them, but that the U.S. and its allies in the capitalist-imperialist West have carried out (and continue to carry out) variations on this particular crime over and over again in countless countries across the Global South.
The film’s affective potency is further enhanced by the innovation and exquisite artistry of its production. Of the various reviews that I have read of the film so far, this point is driven home most compellingly by the Dutch film journalist Kees Driessen, who argues in a review for a European documentary trade publication that Soundtrack to a Coup d’État “isn’t just about jazz, it is jazz.” Like most people, when I think of ‘jazz’ I think of music, not cinema. As such, I don’t think it ever would have occurred to me, had I not read Driessen’s review to think of the film itself as a form of jazz. But the more I think about it, the more difficult it becomes for me to conjure up any other word with which to describe a film like Soundtrack to a Coup d’État. What else should we call a work that is able to so deftly and rhythmically combine so many disparate elements into one cohesive, mesmerizing whole? As Driessen puts it:
It’s the editing and storytelling itself which breathe jazz, in the way they introduce recurring themes and motifs, speed up and slow down, zoom in, pause, improvise, then jump to another narrative thread, another melodic line, without ever losing the beat or through-line. It’s exhilarating to watch.
• • •
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, which can only be described as a masterpiece in every sense of the term, has too many strengths to name. Perhaps the greatest of these, however, is the care and intentionality with which it reminds us that although we study history to learn about the past, objects in the rearview mirror are always much closer than they appear. It would have been easy to approach the subject matter of a film like this from the perspective of detached historical interest, presenting the history of Belgian imperialism in the Congo and the 1960 coup against Lumumba with the same ‘sins of the past’ framing that is such a common feature of liberal discourses around imperialism and colonialism. Such a framing would have situated the events that the film depicts squarely in the past, presenting them as a dark chapter of history that has thankfully since come to a close. It would have lent weight to the disingenous narrative advanced in recent years by the leaders of many former colonial powers, for whom hand-wringing and performative apologies over the crimes of colonial rule serve as a convenient tool with which to evade responsibility under the guise of shouldering it by sidestepping any discussion of material reparations or the violent realities of neocolonialism that their governments are, more often than not, still deeply complicit in.
But that’s not what Soundtrack to a Coup d’État does. Near the beginning of the film, a few seconds from a Tesla commercial are spliced in without warning among clips from the United Nations and interviews with South African mercenary fighters. The sudden appearance of this advertisement, with its high-definition video and blindingly bright flights flashing across close-up shots of the car’s sleek lines, cuts a stark contrast against the grainy, black-and-white archival footage that makes up the overwhelming majority of the film. At first I was caught off guard when I saw this, even wondering for a moment whether the theater had made the bizarre choice to show the film with ad breaks. Judging from the stifled round of nervous laughter that rose up from the seats around me, it sounded like my fellow moviegoers were wondering the same thing.
This confusion, however, only lasted for a moment, until I remembered what exactly goes into producing a Tesla car. In order to make rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, electric-vehicle manufacturers like Tesla, as well as countless other companies across the tech and electronics sectors (including whichever company made the device you’re reading this on), require cobalt—a critical mineral that has been called the “blood diamond of batteries” for the corruption, violence, and brutal exploitation that run rampant throughout its mining industry. The DRC is the world’s largest supplier of cobalt, responsible for nearly three-quarters of global production, and the total value of the country’s untapped cobalt deposits—some 3.5 million tons—could be as high as $24 trillion.
But despite this staggering mineral wealth, which by all accounts should make the DRC the richest country in the world, the vast majority of the country’s mines are controlled by foreign interests and multinational corporations, while nearly three-quarters of its population live in extreme poverty. The country’s cobalt mining sector is among the most brutally exploitative industries in the world, with hundreds of thousands of people employed in euphemistically-named ‘artisanal mines’ where they are forced to perform backbreaking manual labor under horrifically unsafe conditions for just pennies a day. And cobalt, of course, is just one of countless precious minerals, so critical to the production of electronic goods and other luxuries that Western countries like the United States rely on, that are mined in the DRC.
These horrors have only been exacerbated by the current situation in the country, where in the last few weeks Rwandan-backed M23 rebel militias have captured Goma, the capital and largest city of the embattled North Kivu province, and have continued their push towards the country’s capital city of Kinshasa. Hundreds have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced by the recent offensive, adding to the more than 5 million people in the country who have already been displaced by intensifying violence in the last few years. The decades-long conflict in the DRC cannot be separated from struggles over the country’s vast mineral wealth and other natural resources, and the current escalation is no exception—the eastern region where the M23 rebels hold territory is particularly mineral-rich, and the illicit trade in gold, coltan, and other precious minerals is a major source of funding for the rebel militia.
The DRC’s neighbor Rwanda, which is backing the rebels, has long served as a key regional proxy for imperialist interests. As a statement released on February 7th by the Progressive International and signed by more than 200 social movements and civil society groups around the world puts it:
[Rwanda’s] military is armed by the United States, United Kingdom, France, the European Union, and supported by other proxies like Uganda. It is closely aligned to Israel and its intelligence and military are equipped with Israeli-made spyware and weapons. Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president, remains a key ally of the West even as his regime surveils, jails, tortures, disappears and assassinates critics; seizes sovereign territory; and violates the most fundamental norms of international law . . .
Even when the crisis is given cursory acknowledgement, it is attributed to “regional instability” — a nebulous and passive category that transmutes the systemic into the innate, obscuring the role of imperialist accumulation as it destroys African land and truncates its peoples’ lives.
In other words, a direct line can be drawn from the events depicted in Soundtrack to a Coup d’État to the events currently unfolding on the ground in the Congo—from the imperialist overthrow of Patrice Lumumba, whose pan-Africanist sympathies and sovereigntist policies posed a clear threat to the profits of foreign mining interests, to the current efforts by imperialist powers and their proxies to destabilize the DRC and extract even more of its natural wealth. All of this, of course, is happening in service of our ability, as residents of the imperial core, to enjoy the fruits of this imperialist violence and neocolonial exploitation—to scroll on the same iPhones and drive in the same Teslas that make such a brief but jarring appearance in the film.
As this realization dawned upon me, I thought of the film’s title—Soundtrack to a Coup d’État—and then thought back to 2019, when a U.S.-backed 2019 coup in Bolivia overthrew the country’s democratically-elected president Evo Morales and installed in his place a far-right government under Jeanine Añez. Morales and other Bolivian leaders have repeatedly denounced the 2019 coup as a ploy by the United States to gain control over Bolivia’s lithium reserves, which are the largest in the world and which, like the DRC’s cobalt reserves, are critical to the production of rechargeable batteries for electric vehicles and other electronic goods. In the aftermath of Morales’ ouster, when a Twitter user accused Tesla CEO (and infamous Nazi) Elon Musk of helping to orchestrate the coup in order to access Bolivian lithium, Musk replied: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”
I then thought about the havoc that Musk and his cronies were currently wreaking in Washington under the aegis of the Trump Administration’s so-called ‘Department of Government Effiency,’ taking control of government systems and hacking away mercilessly at the last remaining shreds of what passes for a regulatory and administrative state in this country. This full-frontal assault on the federal government and its civil service, modeled on the disastrous ‘chainsaw’ approach of Argentina’s far-right president Javier Milei, has been described by many as a ‘coup’ being carried out by the world’s richest man, who has not been elected or confirmed to any public office.
Whether or not Musk’s actions actually rise to the level of a coup d’état is beyond the scope of my expertise—if they do, the DOGE coup certainly looks quite different, and in many ways far tamer, than the sort of coup that the United States has historically opted to engineer in other countries. Ultimately, of course, the distinction between ‘coup’ and ‘not-coup’ in this case is more or less a semantic one. But let’s say for a moment that what’s happening in Washington today is, in fact, a coup—that the political class and legacy media outlets, many of whom have never had any problems cheering on coups when the United States has orchestrated them abroad, are correct in asserting that the same thing is now happening here on American soil. Such a development would certainly be scandalous, even incendiary, but it would not be in the least bit surprising.
After all, as Malcolm X famously reminded us, chickens have a funny habit of always coming home to roost.
• • •
When the screening was over, my friend and I walked out of the theater in near-total silence, both of us struggling to find words that could do justice to what we had just seen and experienced and felt. Certainly, the film had left me with a healthy dose of righteous outrage. There was also, however something else, something quieter but arguably more profound—a sense of deep melancholy, of mourning for a world that could have been but was never given the chance to flourish. Throughout its duration, the film takes care to ensure that the viewer does not forget the fact that Patrice Lumumba did not exist in a vacuum. On the contrary, Lumumba’s heroic commitment to Congolese self-determination—a commitment for which he paid the ultimate price—was in fact part of a much larger Third Worldist project which sought to unite the peoples of the colonized and neocolonized world around a radical vision for a more just international order. For a brief but beautiful moment in time, the film reminds us, the peoples of the Global South cradled the seeds of this new world in the palm of our hand, only to have it violently ripped away from us. Though they may have taken different forms in different places, the same horrors orchestrated in the Congo were replicated throughout the 20th century across Asia, Africa, and Latin America as the forces of empire used every weapon in their arsenal, from coups to invasions to blockades to massacres, to bring the Third World to its knees.
We are living now amid the wreckage of that imperial onslaught. Socialist governments which once pursued radical projects of sovereign development for the benefit of their own people have been replaced by corrupt comprador elites, neoliberal globalization has accelerated the Global South’s transformation into a playground for parasitic Western capital and resource extraction, and the global economy is barreling once again towards another disastrous Third World debt crisis. Meanwhile, the United States is rapidly entering a new stage of protracted imperial decay, which is only being further exacerbated as the Trump Administration’s fascist grotesquerie increasingly gives the lie to the mythos of liberal-democratic exceptionalism that has underpinned American empire for so long. As the contradictions that plague the capitalist-imperialist world system continue to heighten and intensify, it is increasingly clear that the center of this brutal order simply cannot hold—that the question at hand is not whether things will eventually fall apart, but when and how.
Writing in March 2024, five months into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the Palestinian writer and poet Mohammed El-Kurd described his sobering realization that “Gaza has the right to forsake us, to never forgive us, to spit in our faces.” The same, I think, could be said of the Global South writ large. I would understand entirely, and would not blame them in the slightest, if the nations of the Third World were inclined to take this moment of global churn as an opportunity to seek revenge for what was done to them—to return to us, basking complacently in the blood-soaked luxury of our imperial plunder, even a fraction of the devastation that we have visited upon them.
Certainly, the pearl-clutching and fearmongering from the imperialist ruling class over the Global South’s newfound assertiveness in recent years, as well as the rise of Southern powers like China whose ascendance threatens the stability of U.S.-led unipolar hegemony, indicates that the elites who control the levers of empire are paralyzed by precisely this fear. Such a fear, however, betrays not only a fundamental misunderstanding of the present situation, but also the profound paranoia and existential guilt that rests at the heart of the Western psyche. It is telling that the imperialist West has failed to grasp that the oppressed strive for something far more meaningful than mere retribution; that only the oppressor would concern themselves with something so petty and dehumanizing. Where the oppressor seeks vengeance, the oppressed seek justice—and though the West seems incapable of recognizing it, the difference between the two could not be more stark.
We are witnessing this chasm—between a vision of the world rooted in the pursuit of vengeance, and one rooted in the pursuit of justice—widen more and more with each passing day. The reality is that while our present situation is undeniably a bleak one, and one that was brought about by precisely the sort of imperialist violence depicted in Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, the tides of history are nevertheless beginning to turn in a subtle but critical way. While the United States and its fellow travelers in the imperialist camp flail madly about, lashing out ever more erratically in a desperate attempt to cling onto what remains of their eroding hegemony and punish those who challenge it, the Global South is coalescing and unifying around a common vision of a more just and multipolar world order. This vision, rooted in principles of shared development and sovereign equality, is being articulated on a scale that the world has not seen since the heyday of Third Worldism and the Non-Aligned Movement.
Describing these shifts, acclaimed Marxist historian Vijay Prashad has written and spoken extensively of what he calls a “new mood” in the Global South—a renewed spirit of assertiveness and cooperation among Southern nations, characterized first and foremost by a refusal to continue allowing the countries of the imperial core to dictate the terms of the global agenda. This new mood can be observed in the development and strengthening of new platforms and forums for South-South cooperation, whether through the expansion of the BRICS geopolitical bloc or the formation of international groupings like the ‘Hague Group’ of nations pursuing collective action to hold Israel accountable for the genocide in Gaza. It can be observed as well in the countless ways that Southern nations are standing up and asserting themselves against the pressures of Western hegemony—from Pan-Africanist governments in West Africa forming the Alliance of Sahel States as a united front against French neocolonialism, to Southern nations rallying around South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, to the presidents of Mexico and Colombia refusing to bow to the Trump Administration’s bullying on tariffs and deportations.
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The new mood in the Global South isn’t some far-off pipedream, nor is it the product of mere wishful thinking by those who are incapable of letting the past go. It’s already here, all around us, plain for all to see if we only know where to look. And while only time will tell what becomes of this new mood, any attempt to understand it is incomplete if it does not recognize it for what it is: a continuation and modern manifestation of the same ‘Bandung Spirit’ that motivated the Third Worldist project, that the forces of empire tried to stamp out when they overthrew Lumumba and Nkrumah and Sukarno and Allende and so many others.
For all their guns and tanks and bombs, however, what the forces of empire failed to recognize when they tried to crush the Bandung Spirit is that you cannot kill the spirit of liberation, any more than you can prevent the sound of music from sending its vibrations out through the air to be absorbed irreversibly into everything they touch. They failed to grasp this basic reality then, and they still fail to grasp it now. Despite empire’s best efforts, the spirit of the Third World continues to reverberate all around us like the final notes of a jazz performance, lingering in the concert hall long after the show has drawn to a close, settling in every nook and cranny of the space and waiting patiently for the next performer to come by, pick up the horn, and start blowing once again.
culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer and organizer Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe and receive new essays in your inbox: