Johan Grimonprez’s ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’ Details the Origins of Congo Crisis

Lumumba’s murder is central to Grimonprez’s documentary film, but it’s much more than that. Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat is a sprawling, masterful interweave of colonial cruelty, western callousness towards Africa, the singular power of music as an amplifier, the unparalleled strength and unspeakable suffering of women when everything goes awry, and the lasting, definitive impact of a failed revolution. It’s a gripping historical treatise with a distinct pulse.

“For four and a half years we were editing and then we were still exploring the archives,” the Belgian filmmaker tells OkayAfrica. The film benefits greatly from that thoroughness, packed with archival footage, narrated testimonies and ultra-relevant excerpts researched from books written by key actors and related figures.

Technically, It’s inventive. Fusing politics and history with jazz and rumba, Grimonprez often intertwines key events with relevant songs and music pieces, sometimes commingling visuals of both historical moments and performance footage. It not only indicts key actors in Congo’s crisis, but is also an in-depth education on pan-African and Black history. The film, which won the Special Jury Award for Cinematic Innovation at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, starts screening today at Los Angeles’ Film Forum, and will expand to Chicago and London later this month.

Below, Grimonprez talks about the irony of colonial history being lodged with colonizers, intentionally telling the stories of women within the context of a revolution, and more.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What did it take to make such a detailed documentary?

Well, it's rooted in my practice and the previous films I worked on. I was already collecting a lot of themes and there's a lot of archival footage that I researched in the last 30 years, so it grows out of the research that was there. You live with this, of course, but the real research and like digging into the themes was the learning curve as well. There's a lot of things I discovered that I did not know about my country.

We did a lot of exploration of the United Nations archives, mainly the 15th General assembly from September 23 to mid October 1960. For four and a half years we were editing and still exploring the archives. There was a lot of help from the students and interns who were working in the studio because there wasn’t a big budget.

A big part also came from the AfricaMuseum in Brussels, which is actually the Colonial Museum of Leopold the second. They have been questioning themselves and sort of redefining what their role is, so the museum has been restructured, but they have a huge basement with enormous amounts of footage I had access to. Belgian television as well.

Isn’t it ironic that the colonial rulers have all this history?

Yeah, I mentioned all these western institutions, but we also had big help from Eve Blouin, for example, the daughter of (iconic activist and Lumumba associate) Andreé Blouin, who has a totally different perspective, and In Koli Jean Bofane, who’s a Congolese Belgian writer. There were a lot of advisers and Lumumba scholars that had a lot of input. Also, I’m with Jean Bofane when he says at the end of the film that it’s actually up to us to rewrite that history.

It is ironic indeed that we have to go to Brussels to look for that history. Everything pre-1960 in Congo is, for a big part, still located in Belgium. There’s still the neo-colonial disarray even with what’s going on now, because there was only sort of a parliamentary investigation into [Lumumba’s] murder and it happened only after the millennium change [and] because of a publication that was critical about the Belgian government and the complicity of the monarchy in the murder.

But then the conclusion was still very safe, the king went to Kinshasa (formerly Leopoldville) about [two years] ago to say sorry. But what is a sorry? Even now, I would say what was put in place in 1960 with the mining companies, it’s exponentially even worse because it’s still the same shit.

Why hasn’t anything changed and how can things change?

It's a whole neo-colonial grab and it hasn't changed. It's still as Kwame Nkrumah says, “Africa is not poor, it's the Africans who are poor.” I think it’s outside forces and interest by big corporations who sort of install a kleptocracy because that’s still the case in the Congo; they install a government that is in favor of those corporations and they suck the country dry.

The Congolese people are the victims and they’re banding together. In City of Joy, many of these women who have been assaulted actually started a village and they are very much activists. They are really trying to hold the government accountable. It's ironically women who are actually the most activists in the East Congo.

Yeah, in the film, there’s a deliberate intent to show the role of women at that time.

Yeah, for example Blouin was on the campaign trail in the Kivu province, she was the only woman with all these male politicians. It was also how the role of the woman was looked upon in Congo, and if you read her memoirs, there are all these stories of women that were being sold; they were property. So, she really came up for the rights of women and I’m sure Lumumba would have appointed her as a minister or something, because she was already Chief of Protocol and speechwriter.

And, of course, we zoomed in on Blouin because her story was never told. Same with Leonie Abo – we didn't want to label her as the wife of Pierre Molele, who was the education minister under Lumumba. She was a rebel in her own right. Their stories have hardly been told.

Were you into jazz before making the film, and what led you to make music such an integral part of it?

I was not a jazz buff; that was also a learning curve during the research period, and I was astonished to find out that those jazz musicians, like Louis Armstrong or Dizzy Gillespie or even Duke Ellington later on, were used [by the U.S. State Department]. But for me, it's both movements, you know. We also have Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, who lived in Accra, Ghana for some time, and Maya Angelou as well. It’s Lincoln, together with Angelou and the Women's Writer Coalition in Harlem that initiated the riot when they announced that Lumumba was killed.

It’s musicians that would take a stance in tracks that they wrote, like “Tears for Johannesburg,” which was inspired by the massacre in Sharpeville, with the women tearing up their apartheid passports. The film starts with the opening salve of [Roach’s] drum and ends with the scream of Lincoln, which alludes to the fact that she's so angry, she's not accepting what's going on in the world. The music has those different forces and it is very much a historical agent; I could not but make the music as a protagonist in the film.

Where else will the film screen?

I would love for the film to be just widely shown. I think of [Cameroonian writer] Achille Bembe who says we’re all colonized in our heads. We all have a connection to this film, with the lithium batteries in our phones and [electric cars]. The whole world is interwoven in this story, including the UN General Assembly as well, which is still an institution of neo-colonialism.