When jazz defended the freedom of the Congo

A month earlier, the chosen Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was shot by soldiers from the Belgian Marionetten regime in the province of Katanga.

Less than six months after the start of the 16 African countries, which had just obtained independence from the European colonial powers, the Council, which had originally been founded to defend the right of self -determination of the peoples, had discredited. The members of the African and Asian block, emerged from the Bandungs ​​conference in Java in 1955, went to the barricades.

The CIA sends jazz musicians to Africa

The Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez recapitulates the historical moment in his frenetic, nominated documentary “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Atat”, in which the emancipation movements of the African Americans and the Africans interweave.

An important factor was the music of Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie (the “Goodwill Jazz Ambassador”), which already in the late 1950s on behalf of the Cultural Freedom tours financed by the CIA on the African continent had completed the political influence of the Soviet Union culturally.

Grimonprez, in turn, holds against the recordings of Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach. A few weeks before Lumumba’s murder, they had the influential jazz album “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite ”, originally an appreciation of the black liberation struggle.

Now Grimonprez is cutting her live recordings between the archive material from the storm to the UN Assembly, the “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat”. Abbey Lincoln’s angry lawsuit still echoes when the pictures have long been silent.

Grimonprez has assembled a breathless transatlantic history hour in the spirit of Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Miriam Makeba from news material, home videos, diary entries, memoirs and jazz recordings. Time documents of the stormy years when jazz became more radical and pop music from the continent political.

Africa is the pistol, the Congo the trigger

In addition to the read memories of the Lumumba confidants-Andrée Blouin, which was revealed by the West as “concubine”, which in 1960 smuggled the planned fall of the freely chosen Congo government in her bun hugged to New York, is central in his film. With the author in Koli Jean Bofane.

In “Congo Inc.”, Bofane describes the conversion of the colony into a Belgian and American self -service shop for the coveted raw materials. Even the uranium for the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from the mines in the Congo, the mineral resources were very hot in the Cold War.

Frantz Fanon’s famous sentence dates from 1961: “Africa has the shape of a pistol, and the Congo is the deduction.”

Grimonprez ‘Collage-the numerous text boards are peppered with footnotes and held in a gorgeous Typo, which cites the cover of the jazz label Blue Note-is increasingly free) as stirring as exhaustive.

In dealing with events in those earth -shattering six months, he is more associative than chronologically, and in this he also follows the guidelines of music.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is back in the news these days, and like in 1960 it is about the raw material -rich regions in the east of the country. And again the West watches stand that Europe and neighboring Rwanda have taken an agreement on the promotion of raw materials last year.

Grimonprez finds a coherent picture for this continuity in “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat”. He cuts advertising clips twice between his archive recordings of rebellion and departure – from Tesla and Apple.