Oscar Docs: ’Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat'

Title: Oscar Docs: 'Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat'

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Every year, an Oscar season, as most of the media focus on the competition for best picture and best actors, we invite the makers of the five films nominated for best feature-length documentary, and we'll do one of those interviews right now. The nominated film is called Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat. Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat.

With sound and visuals, it tells the story of the assassination in 1960 of Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, after it won independence from Belgian colonial rule, but it centers not just the political figures of the time, like US President Eisenhower, Lumumba himself, and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, but also iconic American jazz musicians who were recruited to play a role in American diplomacy in Africa at the time. Icons like Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong.

Narrator in the Clip: One of America's most popular emissaries arrives in the troubled Congo on a State Department's goodwill mission. Louis' solid swinging outraged Radio Moscow, which blasted Armstrong's visit as a diversionary tactic.

Brian Lehrer: That archival news clip begins to set the scene in the trailer for the film, but what did jazz have to do with it? With us now is the director of Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, Johan Grimonprez. His bio page on the movie site IMDb says Grimonprez's work seeks out the tension between the intimate and the bigger picture of globalization. Earlier films you may know from the 1990s include Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y and Documenta X, which IMDb says eerily foreshadowed the events of September 11th.

He also made Shadow World in 2016. He splits his time between Belgium and New York. Johan, thanks for coming on in our Oscar documentary series. Congratulations on your nomination, and welcome to WNYC.

Johan Grimonprez: Thanks, Brian. Thanks for offering the platform.

Brian Lehrer: With so much going on in today's world, including in Congo, why did you choose to make a film about the assassination of Lumumba in 1960?

Johan Grimonprez: Well, my background, I'm from Belgium. This is a black page out of the history of the Belgian, sort of Congolese history-- out of the history of my country, and it's something we were not taught in class, in school. Although Congo is all around you, when you grow up in Belgium, it's so intertwined with the history of Belgium, but you don't learn.

I didn't learn about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. He's still labeled a communist in Belgium, which the Belgians did to actually get the Americans, the US, on their side, actually to concoct the assassination in cohorts with the Belgian intelligence and the CIA. I thought that story had to be told. There's a lot of evidence that came out in 1990 with the publication of Ludo De Witte's book, The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba. We subsequently launched a Parliamentary Commission in early 2000s up to 2004.

The conclusion was, "Yes, Belgium was involved," but Ludo De Witte would say, "It's actually even worse. It was a complicity, complicity even from the side of the United Nations where the then Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld was involved in the downfall of Patrice Lumumba," but also my country and the monarchy were actually involved and knew about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. It's a story that still is, for a big part, wiped under the carpet [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: We'll get into some of that history in particular, but so interesting that it's personal for you in that way. We deal with things like that in this country. Stories about our history that haven't been told and swept under the rug, and so for you being a Belgian, and Belgium was the colonial power over Congo for all those years. The archival news clip we played, can you tell us more about who was deploying some of the most famous US jazz musicians to do exactly what as emissaries on behalf of the United States government?

Johan Grimonprez: Right, but let's shape the context. The context is also the 15th General Assembly, 16 African countries are admitted to the world body, and that shakes up the [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: That's the United Nations General Assembly right around that time, late 1950s, 1960.

Johan Grimonprez: Yes, in September. It shakes up that body, and both east and west are trying to wrestle control of that world body, the United Nations General Assembly. Nikita Khrushchev proposed decolonization resolution to get the Global South in his camp. United States under President Eisenhower would send in arm twisters. They are actually PR agents, but they're actually CIA agents that are sent into the General Assembly to buy up the votes.

Next to that, they would send, this is one month after the 15th General Assembly, they sent Louis Armstrong as a jazz ambassador to the Congo to cover up, that actually underneath they're going to plot the downfall, the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba and then also subsequently his assassination, but you have to know-- Louis Armstrong is sent to the Congo. You have to know this is very schizophrenic because back home they're second-rate citizens. They're not even allowed to vote, but nevertheless, they actually send out as instruments to promote democracy.

That in itself is already like double-layered, but also the fact that actually we're talking third week of October, he's arriving in Leopoldville the third week of November. He's actually on the African tour. Refuses to play for an Apartheid audience. It's not because they were actually sent as instruments of propaganda that they were passive agents. They were very much critical about their role as well.

Unbeknownst, of course, of what was actually they were used for. Only later on, when he's back in the United States, he threatens to resign his US citizenship to actually move to Ghana. He's sent in November, third week of November, he arrives in Katanga. Katanga is not ratified. Katanga was used by actually the elite Union Minière, which is the mining corporation, which initially goes back to Leopold II.

Brian Lehrer: That's a region of the Congo, right?

Johan Grimonprez: Yes. It's actually secessionist province that was actually used by the Union, by the mining industry, to split up the Congo, to actually get back at Patricia Lumumba. They propped up a Marinette President Moïse Tshombe, and here we have Louis Armstrong arriving in Katanga and is having dinner with actually Larry Devlin, the head of the CIA, but he didn't know his cover was [unintelligible 00:06:31] advisor, and sitting in front of Moïse Tshombe, together with US Ambassador Timberlake and all the Belgian advisors to that regime, that secessionist regime.

Louis Armstrong is very verbal. He says, "You're in bed with big money," he says to Moïse Tshombe, "You take some, you have to give some." All that layers are actually part of how music really, as sort of a protagonist, made it into the film. Because researching that period, it really was like music, it was really stepping onto the political stage. It's not only the jazz ambassadors. You also had, for example, Abbey Lincoln from the Max Roach Quartet, who actually [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Jazz singer, for people who don't know the name, Abbey Lincoln from the time.

Johan Grimonprez: They made an album, We Insist! Freedom Now, very much an activist album inspired by the wind of independence that was blowing over Africa. That actually inspired the civil rights movement here in the United States. It's that track from We Insist! Freedom Now, that book ends the film, the drum salve of Max Roach.

The drummer opens the film and ends with the scream of Abbey Lincoln, but it's Abbey Lincoln with the Woman's Writer Coalition in Harlem amongst Maya Angelou, the writer, and there was a guy, playwright, that actually organized a protest to crash the UN Security Council when Adlai Stevenson, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, is announcing that Patrice Lumumba had been killed, and they all stand up, 60 protesters, and start screaming, and that's the end of the film. It's an angry resilience of not agreeing what's going on with that situation.

Brian Lehrer: Spoiler alert. The thing that happened in 1960 still happens at the end of the film.

Johan Grimonprez: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to get back to the role of the jazz musicians, which is so fascinating. We'll play a clip from the film of Dizzy Gillespie, but here's a clip of President Eisenhower as I want you to explain a little bit more about why the United States didn't like Patrice Lumumba as head of Congo at that time. Here's a clip from the film of President Eisenhower saying what the official version of US policy toward Congo was as a newly decolonized country.

Actor 1 in the Clip: People of the Congo are entitled to build up their country in peace and freedom.

Brian Lehrer: Eisenhower in 1960 sounds like very straightforward support for democracy, but much has been written since about how the CIA helped facilitate the assassination of Lumumba by his domestic enemies in Congo, at very least. Here's a clip from the film of Larry Devlin, CIA station chief in Congo from 1960-1965, looking back at an encounter he had at a function back at that time, when he walked out onto a terrace, and you'll hear this mixed with a little Louis Armstrong singing at the beginning of this clip.

Actor 2 in the Clip: And seated out on the terrace was a man I recognized. He said, "Well, you have to assassinate Lumumba."

Actor 3 in the Clip: He used those words?

Actor 2 in the Clip: Yes.

Actor 3 in the Clip: But who ordered him?

Actor 2 in the Clip: He said, "President Eisenhower."

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Brian Lehrer: What point are you trying to make, Johan, about the United States at that time, at the height of the Cold War?

Johan Grimonprez: While the Belgians were labeling Patrice Lumumba as a communist, which was not true, in essence, in the beginning of the film, he even states, "I'm not a communist or a Marxist. I'm actually an African," somebody who stood up as a sovereign leader who actually decides that the riches of the country also should go back to the population. Of course, that was threatening because they were afraid he would nationalize the Union Minière, the biggest sort of income of the country, which was delving up also the uranium at the time for the Second World War.

There was that threat that actually Belgium projected onto Patrice Lumumba. President Eisenhower was afraid that NATO, the North Atlantic Trade Organization, would fall apart, the Western coalition would fall apart. He was siding with the colonial countries against the Global South within the United Nations General Assembly, and so here we have secretly, also in cohorts with United Nations and the Belgian Intelligence plotting to overthrow Patrice Lumumba and actually ultimately assassinating him, of course.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and I only pulled clips from the trailer for this segment, but I saw in the actual film how Louis Armstrong seems to publicly embrace and say out loud near the beginning that he was representing the United States. Did the jazz icons know how they were being used?

Johan Grimonprez: Well, you have Dizzy Gillespie also, who is sent to Syria, unbeknownst, the CIA was buying up the Syrian government and was plotting also to overthrow the Syrian government in 1956, we talked 1956, or with Dave Brubeck, 1958. This is not in the film, but he was sent out also to Syria. Then he was actually rerouted by Foster Dulles, the then US Secretary of the State Department, afraid of the pan-Arab Union, Abdel Nasser, the then leader of Egypt, was actually with Syria, making one country that was the United Arab Republic. With Louis Armstrong-- No, let me backtrack.

Dizzy Gillespie actually was saying, "Well, I didn't go over there to sugar coat segregation back home," so, in essence, they were not passive instruments. There's one point where Louis Armstrong, even when he arrives on the African continent, he's about to change the lyrics to the song Black and Blue, which he sings in the film. He sings for the then about-to-become independent Gold Coast, which became Ghana, in company with the then first independent leader, Kwame Nkrumah. He sings Black and Blue, but there's sort of a phrase in that song, "I'm white inside," and he's about to change it to, "I'm right inside."

It's very subtle, but it actually does say that actually he was a bit in the know. Like, for example, with Little Rock, we're talking 1957, he refused to go visit Russia as a black jazz ambassador.

Brian Lehrer: Because of the segregation of the public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas?

Johan Grimonprez: Exactly, and literally he said, "Government can go to hell." It's a quote from the New York Times. He was very upset with President Eisenhower at the time as well.

Brian Lehrer: Is part of the point that the musicians who did have a political consciousness thought they were supporting one kind of US foreign policy, when really they were a kind of smokescreen to distract attention from another?

Johan Grimonprez: Well, it's the two Dulles brothers, Foster Dulles, head of the State Department, Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, and they're two hands on the same tummy. In a sense, one would send out the Jazz ambassadors. The other one would plot overthrow, coup d'état. Hence the title of the film, Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat. Musicians were sent out, but underneath, they were a cover for something much deeper, a deep agenda.

Brian Lehrer: We are in our annual Oscar documentary series in which we invite all five filmmakers who've been nominated for Best Feature Documentary at the Oscars, today with Johan Grimonprez, who made Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat. Here's one more clip from the trailer, this time of the great Dizzy Gillespie. The trailer for the film features this statement by Dizzy about the time when Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, famously banged his shoe on the table during Cold War and said to the west, "We will bury you."

Actor 4 in the Clip: In the UN, when Khrushchev took off his shoe and was beating that shoe, and the interpreter said, "I'll bury you," talking about America, Khrushchev was saying, "I love you," but it was the interpreter who hated America.

Brian Lehrer: That sits out there in the trailer like Dizzy means it, but I know that Dizzy also had a nickname of the Clown Prince of Jazz. He did use a lot of humor in his performances, besides being a master trumpeter, and I can't find any other reference to Khrushchev really saying I love you. What's the context for that, Dizzy Gillespie [crosstalk]?

Johan Grimonprez: Well, he's sort of speaking metaphorically, but he never said, "We'll bury you" in the 15th General Assembly. He never said that. He did say, actually, in '56, with the denouncement of Stalin, "We're going to bury capitalism." It's very different than we're going to bury the United States with missiles. He actually what he really said, and that's the translation in the film, of course. It's actually in the clip, but you can't see it on the radio.

He said, "We're going to bury colonialism, the deeper the better." Actually, it's true in that 15th General Assembly, which I didn't know. For me, the film was itself also a learning curve. He did initiate the decolonization resolution, and that's Resolution 1514 that was ratified December 14 the same year, at the same time, when actually it's the flip side of the story in the film that decolonization resolution is ratified. In the meantime, they're plotting to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, but he never said, "We're going to bury you."

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. You talked earlier about being Belgian and wanting to tell this story in part because the history of Belgian colonization of Congo has been so buried and you don't learn about it in school coming up. I'm curious, how's the film being received there in Belgium?

Johan Grimonprez: Well, we premiered actually in the Congolese neighborhood of Matongé in Brussels, and I have to say it was very lively because Zap Mama, Marie Daulne, who actually reads the voice of Andrée Blouin, the pan-Africanist woman rebel leader who was written out of history because she was a woman, she was present at the first screening and also In Koli Jean Bofane, the Belgian Congolese novelist who's also featured in the film, who reads from his book, the Algorithm Congolese-- The Congolese Algorithm.

It was a very lively discussion, I have to say, the younger audience, because there's a huge influx of African European Community that actually has lent itself to a whole different voice of what's going on in Brussels. You have to know, Brussels, the layout is still the layout from Leopold II. The big avenues, the Palais Royal, the Palais de Justice. It's all laid out with rubber money.

Sort of that trauma of colonization has seeped into the ground and sort of is still unacknowledged, but you have a younger generation that push that actually we should have a Patrice Lumumba Square, which we have, but for me, that's only a small Band-Aid of something of a predicament that is much deeper and is much deeper-rooted in the history of Belgium.

Brian Lehrer: There's currently a civil war going on in Congo, as I imagine, you know,-

Johan Grimonprez: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: -largely over power between factions and who controls valuable minerals. Same as it ever was in a certain respect. Does your film make a case implicitly or explicitly that the country's ongoing relationship with humanitarian crisis was set in motion by the way Belgium and the superpowers handled decolonization?

Johan Grimonprez: Yes, of course. That's why you have the Tesla commercial and the iPhone commercial, and it sort of is followed by a statistic, a statistic that actually $24 trillion conflict minerals are still deposited in the ground of the Congo, but at the same time, you have the statistics of the raped woman. If you put a map on the East Congo of the mining sites and the statistics of the amount of raped women, there's a direct correlation one on one. One in ten women is being raped in East Congo these days. It's the Congo that by private militias, like for example M23, together with Rwandan troops that actually overrun Goma in the East Congo.

It's the site where actually everything is traded and is actually crossing Rwanda border, like we're talking coltan, lithium, copper, gold, but all the minerals that are actually in our iPhone or computer or in our Tesla and actually siphoned off through Rwanda to China, and then Apple can wash their hands and say, "We have nothing to do with it." It's exactly what's happening now. One week, Goma was overrun by Rwandan troops, but all of the mining companies and all the Western interests are being protected because they hold the hand over Kagame. They don't dare to question.

There was a skirmish in the United Nations between South Africa, who has troops there, and Kagame, the leader of Rwanda. It's going on, and I have to say it's exponentially worse what was happening at the time, 5 million since sort of the ensuing crisis and the genocide, it was called the First African World War, actually was called in the '90s, and there was genocide after genocide. Denis Mukwege, who's actually running Panzi Hospital, very close, because they're heading now. M23 is already heading towards Bukavu, and Bukavu is close to Panzi, where Denis Mukwege has a hospital where 80,000 plus women are already treated for rape, and it's not just rape, it's how they were treated, with the bayonet.

It's the women that actually could make it to the hospital. It says so much, but Denis Mukwege has tried to bring the cause in front of the United Nations. He got the Nobel Peace Prize for what he did in Ponzi, but twice already or several times in the United Nations, bringing the cause and says, "We have to hold those criminals accountable," and he included Kagame. Nothing has been done.

They call Rwanda a wonder after the genocide. Of course, it has to do with the Tutsis that were crossing-- There was a civil war in Rwanda, but it was the same history as-- Because it's the Belgians who owned also Rwanda at the beginning in Burundi, and it was divide and conquer, set up the Hutus against the Tutsis. That's also, what you see today is still the result of what was planted at that time.

Brian Lehrer: We've been talking about the history of 1960 as portrayed in the film and its relationship to today, as you were just describing, but I want to back out from the story a little bit and just ask you something about the movie and say something about the movie as a movie, because an award-winning documentary is always a mix of an important story but also of telling that story brilliantly as a film.

I want to say that yours is a feast for the eyes and ears of great music, historical and contemporary sound bites and period piece graphics that recall--, and I wonder if you had this in mind, what 1960 Blue Note Records, album covers and things like that looked like at the time, which is quite a mix of all this incredible art with the infuriating story you're actually telling. How would you describe what you were aiming at with this as a work of art, not just journalism?

Johan Grimonprez: Well, you remarked that well, it's the Blue Note albums, there's two actually that are featured in the film. There's Art Blakey's and John Coltrane's albums literally also feature in the film, the Blue Note albums. We did inspire ourselves on the Blue Note albums. When we thought, "Okay, we use that for the musicians," we thought, "Why not use it also for the politicians?"

Politicians have the same sort of Blue Note graphics, but more importantly, I think knowing that actually music was so important for that pivotal changing moment in history, when the whole continent became independent, music was very much part of the political scene, so if music would step onto the political stage, we would treat the politicians as lead singers to the jazz composition. That's what we were thinking in the editing, but it worked actually very well. There's something that sort of in the layering happened where one and one becomes three, and you see that by the juxtaposition, sort of the cinematic space opens up as well.

There's something to-- I always laugh. It's sort of an academic PDF disguised as a feature music clip, but it's a music clip, but there is at the same time, what Hitchcock used to do in the North by Northwest, it was his first James Bond genre where a thriller is disguised as a comedy. We sort of used the same style elements where we juxtapose sort of, you have like a music clip and there's a lot of humor as well, because humor can contain contradictions, but there's the thriller element that is also like pushing you forward, as with the music pushes you forward to sort of that denunciation at the very end with the murder of Patrice Lumumba and ultimately the scream of not agreeing with that situation, the scream of anger and resilience by Abbey Lincoln.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, very effective. Johan Grimonprez, one of the five filmmakers up for best feature-length documentary as we strive again this year as part of our alternative service to interview all five of those filmmakers before the awards ceremony, while others talk mostly about the entertainment films. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but this is what we do. Johan, thanks for your time, and as I say to all the directors, good luck at the Academy Awards.

Johan Grimonprez: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for offering the platform.

Brian Lehrer: We'll have another Oscar-nominated documentarian on tomorrow's Brian Lehrer Show, but that's our show for today, produced by Mary Croke, Lisa Allison, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen produces our Daily Politics Podcast. Our intern this term is Henry Scheringer. Megan Ryan is the head of Live Radio, and that was Juliana Fonda, and Milton Ruiz at the audio controls. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for All Of It.

 

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