The three-month transition between a US president’s election and inauguration is a time of great uncertainty, a time when the legacy on which history will pass judgment already feels to be slipping. A time, if possible, to leave one’s successor a few irreversible faits accomplis, not unlike Joe Biden’s attempts this week to copperfasten US military support for Ukraine.
Back in 1960, in the days before John F Kennedy’s inauguration, fearful that the new president might rethink Dwight Eisenhower’s instructions to murder newly-independent Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, the CIA’s man on the ground made sure Lumumba was passed from jail to those itching to do the job. The coup the CIA had helped to engineer was not enough. They tortured Lumumba as they flew him from the capital Léopoldville to the secessionist state of Katanga, where a firing squad, commanded by Belgian officers, shot him dead.
Presented with the fait accompli, Kennedy then threw US support behind CIA pawn and coup leader Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, whose subsequent rule from 1965 to 1997 would be among Africa’s most brutal ever.
This story of the assassination of Lumumba is vividly told in a new documentary by Belgian director Johan Grimonprez, Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat. It weaves extraordinary archive footage, personal testimonies and classic jazz into a multilayered, compelling account of the killing and the time, known as “the year of Africa”. It is set against the broader soundtrack of young African nations’ struggle for independence and the cold war transformation of the UN by an influx of 17 newly decolonised countries.
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Against this background, the racist lynchings and de facto apartheid of southern American states such as Mississippi in the 1960s play a sort of counterpoint to the Congo events. “You’ll never get Mississippi straightened out,” militant black leader Malcolm X tells crowds in Harlem where he greets Lumumba, in town for a UN General Assembly meeting, “until you start realising the connection with the Congo”.
The “soundtrack” is also jazz, playing an unlikely peripheral part in Lumumba’s downfall, with walk-on roles for Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Quincy Jones and Dizzy Gillespie, among others. Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong travelled as a US cultural ambassador to the Congo. “Dave Brubeck was sent to Syria, Armstrong went to Katanga to give it legitimacy,” Grimonprez says of the CIA’s soft-power exercise.
Satchmo was, however, no CIA stooge. “He wasn’t a passive instrument,” Grimonprez insists. “He refused to play in apartheid South Africa and when he found out what the State Department were plotting in Katanga and that he was being used to gather information for the CIA, he was furious. He threatened to leave America and go live in Ghana.”
Another of Grimonprez’s striking cast of characters deserving to be remembered is Andrée Blouin, a close comrade of Lumumba and an adviser to leading nationalist politicians from Algeria, both Congos, Ivory Coast and Mali to Guinea and Ghana. A powerful organiser and orator for pan-Africanism, she was described as “perhaps the most dangerous woman in all Africa”.
And our own late Conor Cruise O’Brien makes an appearance. In May 1961, O’Brien was appointed special representative of UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld to oversee the independence of the Congo. In August he became embroiled in controversy after ordering UN peacekeeping troops to take control of Katanga from secessionist rebels, allegedly on his own initiative. O’Brien was in fact authorised at the highest level to take the action he did.
[ Letters show O’Brien had UN authority for actions in KatangaOpens in new window ]
Just five months before his assassination, the charismatic Lumumba, already a giant among independent Africa’s new generation of leaders, had celebrated his country’s independence, conceded by Belgium in 1958, with a speech in front of King Baudouin excoriating the colonial power’s brutal historic role. “[I]t was a noble and just struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force.”
Belgium, supposedly departing, but determined to cling on to its huge mineral deposits, was fomenting secession in the rich province of Katanga and dissension in the Congolese army. It would take its revenge on Lumumba who, having vainly appealed to the US and then the UN for help against the secessionists, turned to the Soviet Union. Evidence enough that he was really a communist and to “justify” his execution.
Belgium in 2002 acknowledged, and apologised for, its role in the killing and its bloody colonial plunder of the country. In 2018 as this paper’s Europe correspondent, I watched as hundreds of Brussels Congolese celebrated joyfully the renaming of a square in his name. The US has yet to apologise or take full responsibility for its part.
[ Belgium opens up to horrors of its colonial pastOpens in new window ]
Stuart Reid, in his 2023 The Lumumba Plot unearthed the minutes of the meeting at which the presidential order was given to CIA director Allan Dulles, and Soundtrack recalls Eisenhower’s reported hope that “Lumumba would fall into a river full of crocodiles”.
“The US broke Congo and owes it an apology,” Reid insists.