Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat:
The Tragedy of Patrice Lumumba
One of the most sorrowful stories of the post-World War II decolonization era is that of Patrice Lumumba and the Congo. It is a tale that I first discovered almost thirty years ago and wrote about for Probe magazine. But last year, there was a new documentary film made on the subject. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat was directed by Johann Grimonprez and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film at this year’s ceremony. It is worth seeing.
Patrice Lumumba was the first prime minister of the newly independent state of the former Belgian Congo. He died at the age of 35, after Congo had been independent for about seven months. He was killed by a firing squad in the breakaway state of Katanga under the supervision and auspices of Belgium, but with the aid of the United States. America had previously tried to kill him more than once through the CIA. Lumumba was an articulate and charismatic leader who, contrary to what he was depicted to be, was not a communist. But he fiercely believed in the independence of Congo, as well as the decolonization of Africa and also the Pan African movement. To some in those Cold War years, this made for a serious problem.
In and of itself, this is a quite gripping and moving story. In fact, there have been several books written on the subject. In 2000, there was a biographical feature film made by director Raoul Peck. The truly remarkable aspect of the story is that Lumumba’s government was a freely elected republic. Yet both Belgium and America set out to undo it just about immediately after it was installed. So much for fostering democracy.
Although I thought I knew this material fairly well, there were some new things in the film for me. Such being the case, they will be new for most of our readers. But on top of that, this film has a twist that is related to its title. The story is framed through an original concept. Which is the utilization by the American government of African-American musicians and singers to serve as goodwill ambassadors to Africa. This is at a time when the American South is living under Jim Crow laws. Some of the personages involved are Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong and Miriam Makeba.
Makeba was born in South Africa. She moved permanently to the USA after being exiled and became a successful singer. But she was placed under surveillance by both the FBI and CIA. While traveling abroad, her visa was revoked. Therefore, she moved to Guinea with her husband, Stokely Carmichael. And she stayed in Africa for the next 15 years. Gillespie ran for president in 1964 in order to raise funds for civil rights causes. Some of the things he promised were to recognize China, terminate the FBI and send a black astronaut to the moon. Knowing that Moscow used racism against the USA, Armstrong told the State Department that he would not go to Russia unless America straightened out its problems with segregation in the South.
In the case of Nina Simone, she was tricked. She was sent on a tour of Nigeria in 1961 by something called the American Society of African Culture. This turned out to be a CIA front. She ended up quite upset about the episode, and after Martin Luther King was killed, she moved abroad and spat upon the USA, calling it “the United Snakes of America”. (Article by Jeff Heer, The Nation, 5/29/20)
II
But the film is built around the Lumumba story—and as we shall see—this musical background provides the thematic climax of the picture. Some of the interviews interspersed in the narrative are exceptional. For example, there is one with Larry Devlin, who was the CIA station chief in Leopoldville during the entire Lumumba episode. There is another one with Daphne Park, the longtime MI6 officer who was in Leopoldville at the same time. Park explains that part of the intel strategy there was to pit one group against the other. The film does not include her near-death confession that she helped organize the plot to kill Lumumba. (See London Review of Books, Letters section, 4/11/13) Devlin says that CIA chemist and poisoner Sydney Gottlieb arrived in Leopoldville and told him that Lumumba was to be terminated. And this was on the orders of President Eisenhower. Which means that CIA Director Allen Dulles must have told Gottlieb this, since according to the Church Committee—which the film quotes—Eisenhower told Dulles he wanted Lumumba eliminated. (See also John Newman, Countdown to Darkness, p. 227)
But here I wish the film had included the fact that it was Devlin’s memo to Washington that likely started the plot in motion. His hyperbolic memo said that Congo was experiencing a classic communist takeover, and there was little time at hand to avoid another Cuba. (ibid, p. 223) Plus, Gottlieb was not the only option Devlin used to terminate Lumumba. There were also two CIA-hired killers, codenamed QJ WIN and WI ROGUE. (ibid, p. 268). This was the beginning of the CIA’s ZR/Rifle program under officer William Harvey. (ibid, p. 290)
One of the most interesting parts of the film is what it postulates about a central motive for the termination of Lumumba on the American side. The film’s premise on this is that lurking in the background was the issue of uranium. Much of that element used in the Manhattan Project was garnered from the Congo. It specifically came from the Shinkolobwe mine in Belgian Congo owned by the company Union Miniere. I can’t help but wonder if this is not owing to the fascinating 2016 book by Susan Williams, Spies in the Congo, where she unearthed much of this material. For instance, it was Albert Einstein who first alerted Franklin Roosevelt to the danger of letting Germany build such a bomb first. And he also told Roosevelt that there were plentiful uranium deposits in Congo. (Article by Richard Norton-Taylor, 9/17/16, The Guardian.)
But the film is not just limited to Congo. In its expansiveness, it extends into the attempt at a Non-Aligned nation alliance, and also the movement by African leaders to create a United States of Africa. The prime proponent of the former was Achmed Sukarno of Indonesia. For the latter, it was Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. As the film shows, Lumumba had planned on joining a confederacy between Ghana, Guinea and Mali. Nkrumah always considered Lumumba’s death a serious blow to this union. These two groups place Lumumba in the proper context of the Third World emerging from colonialism and trying to be non-aligned and allied with similar emerging states.
III
A major character in the film, who, to be frank, I had never read about before, is Andree Blouin. Blouin was raised in an orphanage in Brazzaville until she was 17. She ran away and had a son with a Frenchman. The child fell ill with malaria, but the mother was denied quinine since it was only for Europeans. Her son died. She decided to move to France and was later divorced.
It was the death of her son that politically radicalized her. She joined the Guinean Democratic Party to fight for freedom from France. She was so prominent in this movement that she was later expelled from Guinea by Charles de Gaulle. It was that expulsion which drove her to the Belgian Congo to organize their fight for independence. Again, she was quite effective, especially in organizing women.
As the film notes, this brought her to Lumumba’s attention. She became a speechwriter for him and also served as a liaison to European governments like France. She always suspected that Belgium was not really going to leave Congo and that the mother country’s true aim was to set up a puppet government. She was correct in this. And she became a strong spokeswoman against the eventual dictator, Josef Mobutu. Always suspected of being a communist—which she insisted she was not—after Lumumba was assassinated, she came into Mobutu’s crosshairs. She fled to Paris, where she stayed until her death. (Article by Annette Joseph-Gabriel, africasacountry.com, 4/9/19) Retrieving Blouin from the memory hole and bringing her to the attention of the contemporary public is another feather in the cap for this film.
As noted, Blouin was correct about Belgium not intending to leave the Congo. As many scholars have shown, the plan was to abandon the country so abruptly that the shock would throw Congo into chaos. Further, as Lumumba discovered, Belgium had sacked the treasury before they left. (Newman, p.155) Third, Belgium had allied itself with France and England to carve out an independent state in the province of Katanga. In mineral resources, Katanga was the richest area in Congo. If Lumumba could not stop its succession, then Congo could not succeed as a state. Especially since Belgium had dropped paratroopers into the area for the ostensible reason of protecting their citizens who were still there.
IV
In watching this picture’s remarkable film archive, the political personage who comes off the best is Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev. With all that we know today, and with what has happened since, Khrushchev was correct about all the circumstances and the probable impact. He wanted foreign troops and mercenaries out of Congo. In the battle between Lumumba and President Joseph Kasavubu—remember what Daphne Park said about pitting one against another—Khrushchev wanted Lumumba represented at the UN, not Kasavubu. Third, he wanted the UN to condemn colonialism outright and completely. And he did this all in New York, much of it in person. Further, he criticized Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold for moving too slowly and negotiating with Moshe Tshombe of Katanga, which he believed to be an ersatz state—which it was.
Khrushchev was so effective on his two motions—against Kasavubu and condemning colonialism—that he attracted other Third World leaders to the UN, like Gamal Abdel Nasser, Fidel Castro and Achmed Sukarno. He also caused President Eisenhower to appear. And this is one of the most memorable moments in the film. In his address, the president said Congo should be free of any outside interference and be able to pursue peace and freedom without intervention by others. This was after he had given the order to eliminate Lumumba, and three days before Gottlieb flew from Paris to meet with Devlin. Ike’s hypocrisy, shrouded in secrecy, is more than a bit sickening.
Khrushchev won the condemnation vote. He ended up losing the tally on seating Lumumba over Kasavubu. As the film shows, there was much maneuvering behind the scenes in order to attain that latter vote. This was done by the CIA and the ambassador to Congo, Clare Timberlake. And, as most commentators agree, it was this seating of Kasavubu that caused the ultimate tragedy—the death by firing squad of Patrice Lumumba.
V
Mobutu had dismissed Parliament and was clearly aligning himself with Kasavubu and even Tshombe. So Hammarskjold had placed Lumumba under house arrest for his own safety. Ironically, Louis Armstrong played a concert within a mile of Lumumba’s house arrest. Both Devlin and Timberlake were in attendance. Tshombe also arrived — for a payoff. Armstrong got so angry about this that he threatened to renounce his citizenship and move to Ghana.
It was this UN vote that provoked Lumumba into breaking his house arrest and attempting to escape to his base in Stanleyville. The new CIA strategy was not to actually murder him. They would aid his foes in that aim. To further it, Devlin helped Mobutu cut off all possible routes to Stanleyville, thus making his flight harder and more time-consuming. This caused him to be captured, imprisoned and transferred to his dreaded enemies in Katanga. There, Lumumba was executed by firing squad. His body was soaked in sulphuric acid. When the acid ran out, his corpse was incinerated. (Newman, pp. 295-96)
No one has summed up the unsettling, disturbing nature of what happened to Lumumba and the Congo better than the late Jonathan Kwitny:
The democratic experiment had no example in Africa, and badly needed one. So perhaps the sorriest, and the most unnecessary, blight on the record of this new era is that the precedent for it all, the very first coup in postcolonial African history, the very first political assassination, and the very first junking of a legally constituted democratic system, all took place in a major country, and were all instigated by the United State of America. (Endless Enemies, p. 75)
The crowning achievement of the film is its presentation of what happened at the UN when representative Adlai Stevenson announced that Lumumba had been killed. The CIA knew Lumumba had been murdered on January 17, 1961. And there is evidence that his killing had been hurried along so that John Kennedy would not be president while he was still alive. (John Morton Blum, Years of Discord, p. 23) The Agency knew that Kennedy was going to reverse policy and support the restoration of Lumumba. They achieved their aim in three days. But it was not until almost another month that Kennedy’s UN ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, found out about his death. He told Kennedy and then he announced it in session in New York.
Something remarkable happened at this time. Actress/singer Abbey Lincoln, drummer Max Roach, and a young Maya Angelou got tickets for the UN. Joined by many others, they literally invaded the Security Council chambers, screaming “Murderers” “Assassins”. The representatives sat in shock while the security forces tried to subdue and expel the intruders. I had never seen this event before, and it is riveting to watch. Talk about speaking truth to power.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a well-done, intelligent and eloquent film on an important historical subject. Therefore, it is a rarity in the world of cinema today. I would advise all interested parties to see it. You will not be disappointed.
