“America’s strongest weapon is a blue note in a minor key” punctuates Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’s thumping opening sequence. A moment later, American radio phones are dropped from the sky, appearing as bombs, and teleported into African households. Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, armed with his golden trumpet, tours a variety of newly-liberated African countries to swathes of adoring fans; another searing title card appears on-screen: “Today he’s got a saxophone, tomorrow he’s a spy.” 

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a tremendous historical thesis into the early years of post-coloniality and the crunching, brutal machinery of Western imperialism. America’s puppeteering of foreign governments in the Global South during the Cold War warrants little elaboration, and what makes Johan Gimonprez’s effort a revelation is that it argues that American arts and culture, imparted by its larger-than-life cultural emissaries, were as influential a weapon of the imperial arsenal as any forms of espionage or militarism. As Dizzy Gillespie chirps, who the American government also deploys to perform in Iran to commemorate the election of the US-backed Shah, and in Egypt while Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal: “I would be a better emissary than Kissinger.”

One of Soundtrack’s central themes concerns the position of African Americans in the functioning and upkeep of the American imperial core, while that same system imprisons, dehumanizes, and impoverishes them domestically. Black Americans are seen as Africa’s children, naturally, they are inconspicuously welcomed and adored by their ancestral lands and peoples, while for intents and purposes, they are American citizens who, whether they know it (or like it) can become emissaries of imperialism’s machinery. The polarity and contradictions of the African-American position in the struggle of people in the Global South are played out stunningly. During a particularly affecting scene, where so rarely has a film ever uncovered the dramatic heft of archival footage, Louis Armstrong performs in Accra, Ghana. He sings (What Did I Do To Be So) Black & Blue?  As his voice quavers with the passion of the lyrics, his eyes are joined by the reverent gaze of Kwame Nkrumah. The edit cuts between them, although they do not eventually share the frame. They may both know all that it means to be Black and Blue, and could even be distant relatives to one another. However, a chasm of geo-political power structures still separates them from becoming brothers in any meaningful sense. Later on, it is revealed that Armstrong is sent to perform in the secessionist Katanga state as a smoke-screen for agents of the CIA to plot the assassination of Patrice Lumumba with Moi͏̈se Tshombe and his cronies. “Today he’s got a saxophone, tomorrow he’s a spy.” 

Much like the bittersweet scene between Armstrong and Nkrumah, Soundtrack combs through history by use of experimental re-interpretation of archive material from news clips, documentaries, home videos and television shows, with a chorus of voice-overs sourced from voice-acted excerpts of memoirs, audio dairies and a staged interview which avoids the talking-head model in favor of performative spoken word from author In Koli Jean Bofane reciting his book, Congo Inc. 

Despite the depth and scope of the research that makes up his two-and-a-half-hour thesis, Gimonprez resists the temptation of scholarly-inclined documentarians to opt for stolid didactic storytelling for the sake of narrative efficiency and legibility. He employs a frenetic, pastiche editing style that presents history as a scribbled manuscript—littered with a dizzying onslaught of footnotes, quotes, satisfying visual and stylistic quirks, and tangential passages with the lifespan of a whisper of smoke; long enough to make their point, but short enough to escape the obligation of justifying their existence. 

Soundtrack begins its chronology of events with The Bandung Conference, held in Indonesia in 1955. Hosting a consortium of leaders from newly independent colonies from Africa and Asia (a line-up of heavyweights including Egypt’s Nasser, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, and China’s Zhou Enlai), the prestigious heads of state are gallantly paraded on-screen as champions of the new world, forebearers of a new international order that’s neither East nor West but Non-Aligned. Concurrently, Dizzy Gillespie announces a fake bid for the presidency, with his cabinet featuring (among others) Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, and Thelonius Monk. Both events are played for spectacle, which risks trivializing the force behind the genesis of the Non-Aligned Movement. Yet the euphoria of the time, emphasized by the unburdened expressionism of the post-bebop jazz sound that scores most of the film, presents the future as one malleable towards the imperatives of Black and Brown people from Mississippi to Mumbai. Soundtrack manages to celebrate the valor and vision of those post-colonial leaders while painting a picture of Cold War realpolitik that made those promises impossible to realize. 

The year 1960 marked Nkrumah’s “Year of Africa” and, most significantly, Congo’s independence from Belgium. Shortly after the latter, a Belgian invasion to protect its citizens began, and the minerally rich southern province Katanga (backed by the Belgian-owned mine Union Minière) seceded. Afro-Asian countries intervened in the unfolding crisis by establishing a UN peacekeeping force formed from neutral European countries and soldiers in the Afro-Asian bloc. The first of its kind, the UN peacekeeping force was a resounding indication that newly independent African and Asian states could influence anti-imperialist policies and precedents through the UN. What especially troubled Western powers was the ability to implement that influence in opposition to their interests. Scenes of the UN General Assembly in 1960, repeated, segmented, and dispersed throughout the film— sound of Nikita Khrushchev emphatically banging his shoe on a table is set to the rhythm of a jazz drum beat—are as riveting as any political thriller.

Noticing the shifts in world politics, Malcolm X beams from his podium: “There’s a new bloc emerging.”. Malcolm commands many sections in Soundtrack, often accompanied with accounts of his compatriot’s deployment as human camouflages for American interest in newly independent African countries (one account, featuring Nina Simone’s tour to Nigeria). He outlines to his audience that the liberation of African countries from colonial rule was synonymous with Black Americans’ struggle for racial equality in America. Soundtrack holds reverence for the clarity of Malcolm X’s convictions and affinity to the struggle of Africans on the continent, understanding that as much as the American imperial core was willing to inflict violence against its Black civilians, it was more than willing to do it, often in greater force, towards poorer nations abroad. 

As stretched, tangled, and seemingly unwieldy as the many threads of Soundtrack’s thesis are, the events leading to the assassination of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, are what hold everything together. One of the world’s most minerally rich countries, Congo’s plentiful cobalt, rubber, and uranium resources have made it a site of plunder and instability for centuries. Franz Fanon is aptly quoted in Soundtrack stating, “If Africa is shaped like a revolver, the Congo is its trigger.” The man with his finger on Africa’s trigger was Patrice Lumumba. 

At the time Raoul Peck made his early masterpiece on the same subject, Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (1990), accounts of Lumumba’s assassination as a Western-backed coup were shrouded in mystery, treated as a conspiracy from disaffected radicals. In the 30 years since the film’s release, recently declassified CIA intelligence materialized much of what Death of a Prophet could only suggest. Elements of Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat may be the film Peck would’ve wanted to make all those years ago. Peck exploited the censored pages in Congo’s history to create intrigue, where the absence of evidence did not mean the evidence of absence. Armed with everything Peck was deprived of, Gimonprez provides an abundance of textual, anecdotal, and visual evidence that beyond a reasonable doubt indicates whose hands are stained by Lumumba’s blood. 

There are few martyrs whose image is as inextricably linked to their demise as Patrice Lumumba. In an early sequence, footage of Lumumba’s rise in political influence is masterfully intercut with a dramatization of Jesus Christ’s procession to his crucifixion. The fate of the two men is inevitable. Whether or not one is yet to familiarize themselves with Lumumba’s story, the film’s message is clear: the events presented will portray our hero in the process of writing his death warrant.

The small victories during Lumumba’s short-lived tenure as prime minister can feel pyrrhic viewed through the perspective of time, but Soundtrack is most astonishing when it’s able to revitalize these moments with their initial revolutionary zeal. The Belgian King Baudouin’s unceremonious tour to the newly independent Congo, which began with a theft of his sword during his introductory parade, is comically represented in the film with a fitting vaudeville flair. The humiliating peak of King Baudouin’s visit, where after an unapologetic speech glorifying the history of his family’s colonial rule over the Congo, Lumumba would quickly improvise one of his most iconic speeches, castigating Baudouin’s ancestor, King Leopold II, for decades of brutal colonial dictatorship. The scene is an utter triumph, but quick to snatch us from the high of Lumumba’s righteous indignation, Soundtrack reminds us it was moments like these that only emboldened his detractors.

As much as some contemporary analyses of Lumumba’s tenure can characterize him as a charismatic leader without any cogent political strategy for his country’s independence, unity, and sovereignty, Soundtrack paints the realistic picture that his position was insurmountable, impossible to even the most adept of diplomats. The tragedy of his troubled tenure is cleverly articulated through the film’s emphasis on time-stamping the various crises and obstructions that occurred through the days, weeks, months, and, subsequently, quarter-months after Congo declared its independence. The repetition becomes an absurdist leitmotif, spelling out the impossibility of Congo’s sovereignty, that even if Lumumba’s vision could be a mirage, it only lasted for a paltry two-and-a-half months. With a conglomerate of interests spanning international mining companies, the Belgian government, and neighboring white-settler states in South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and Namibia, the guardian of the heart of Africa was isolated, defenseless, and outnumbered. 

Lumumba was not the first or last post-colonial leader to be assassinated for his uncompromisingly anti-imperialist disposition. The timing and shocking brutality of his murder was a sober reminder at the twilight of Nkrumah’s “Year of Africa” that as much ground had been gained, the indifferent machinery of imperialism would continue to operate as crudely and oppressively as it always had. Soundtrack often breaks its visual harmony to display dazzling modern-day adverts for the latest iPhone smartphones and Tesla vehicles, made from Congo’s cobalt reserves, as well as the current war waging in the East, articulating something the film is self-aware enough not to elaborate over a title card: colonialism has never left Congo. 

Soundtrack’s post-modern flair renders other towering and complicated figures of history as symbols, bordering on caricatured representations of themselves without accounting for the weight of their contradictions or nuances in politics. In some shades, it works. In others, it paints the foil of the Non-Aligned Movement to a robust and bluntly violent opposition instead of its internal contradictions. As William Shoki argued in his reflection on non-alignment half a century after the Bandung Conference, one of the primary reasons it could not coalesce into a significant geo-political bloc was that it lacked a formidable working-class base. The material conditions for such couldn’t materialize because “the sociological conditions for mass society and associational life—industrialization and collective provision through a strong state—never came to pass.” Non-aligned leaders saw equity in global politics as a means towards domestic development, but it was precisely domestic development that would’ve provided robust support from below for the newly independent countries to form a formidable geo-political bloc.

Soundtrack is brilliantly seductive at arousing justifiable geopolitical ressentiment, which has only fermented as the years since the Cold War have continued and intensified American imperialism and its hegemony in the developing world. For all its exceptional touches, Soundtrack dwells in this ressentiment, which at times imagines that adept diplomacy and more sympathetic world leaders (in the vein of Russia’s Nikita Khrushchev) may have been all it took for non-alignment to materialize outside of the mass-mobilization of working peoples of the Global South. However, Gimonprez takes us there in the film’s final act. 

Soundtrack reaches its crescendo as Max Roach & Abbey Lincoln’s performance of “Freedom” reaches its fever pitch, and a group of protestors, including Roach, Lincoln, and Maya Angelou, storm the UN General Assembly in 1960 shortly after news of Lumumba’s assassination is announced. As Lincoln’s voice roars, the protestors breach the conference hall. While the majority of the film takes place in the halls of power and explores covert espionage against the newly independent Congo, Soundtrack’s final message functions as a rallying call for global mass mobilization. Better late than never. 

In the half-century since the protest at the UN General Assembly in 1960, Non-alignment appears to carry more semiotic weight than material force, sincerely inheriting few of the ideas born in Bandung, often in the service of pursuing global equality to create domestic inequality in favor of the domestic ruling elite. Most jarringly, in contrast to the generation of Maya Angelou and Malcolm X, is the posturing of the modern-day African-American intelligentsia, who tend to exceptionalize the plight of their compatriots at the expense of building solidarity across the Atlantic. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent launch and tour of his book “The Message” garnered controversy through his reflection and newly-found understanding of the functioning of Israel as an Apartheid state. As one of the foremost voices speaking on race relations during Barack Obama’s presidency, there was a sense on either side of the fence that he was risking something. 

The institutions that had placed him on a pedestal felt betrayed, and even the most skeptical of observers could appreciate his willingness to test (and at times erode) the goodwill he had built over the past decade. The story that surrounded the launch of Coates’ book revealed less about the author than it did of the positionality of many public voices speaking for the advancement of African-American interest, many of whom have drawn themselves so intimately to the heartbeat of the imperial core, that condemning a state-sponsored genocide is tantamount to career suicide. As Soundtrack lays out clearly in its thesis, as Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong protest their deployment in Nigeria and Katanga after learning about the covert motivations behind their respective tours, in the public sphere, it appears no American is exempt from oiling the gears of the American empire. 

In its entirety, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is tremendous. Conventional forms of filmmaking have manufactured an expectation for legibility in our cinema.  Filmmakers begins to ask themselves a question, finds an answer, and start making their film. Few filmmakers dare to make the question itself a point of departure. It’s in these films that an ignition of improvisation and dialecticism takes hold. The answer a filmmaker arrives at in their final cut may not be succinct, but it nonetheless charts a remarkable journey. The splendors of these journeys are almost solely dependent on the depth and color of the filmmaker’s introspection.

For his part, Johan Gimonprez’s work on Soundtrack to a Coup E’tat is an outstanding testament that a film need not always be the conclusion to a thesis, but the thesis itself.