ACCORDING TO Dmitri A. Borgmann’s 1967 book Beyond Language, the most likely explanation for the “the” in front of “The Congo,” was that it, like “The” Sudan, “The” Transvaal, “The” Ukraine, and other such definitely articled locations, was once a site of imperialistic adventure – “patriotic adventure,” as Borgmann wryly puts it, especially as advanced by the British.
In 1908 it was annexed as a Belgian colony. Like so much colonialization, this was rationalized as being good for the natives even as the rubber exports enriched the mother country – and would continue to prove enriching through two world wars. Alongside which uranium, which had been discovered in Shinkolobwe (southern Congo) in 1915, became far more vital, first to the failed German nuclear program, then in the Manhattan Project and all subsequent bomb-building in the U.S.
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This is enough information to get you ready for two recent works that examine this subject in two very different ways. One is a film documentary, “Soundtrack to a Coup d’état,” which has been accumulating awards on the (more or less) indie circuit; the other is William Boyd’s new novel Gabriel’s Moon, for which those dramatic political events in Congo form the book’s backbone.
“Soundtrack to a Coup d’état” is a masterfully assembled voyage through music and politics, written and directed by Belgian artist and filmmaker Johan Grimonprez, whose most recent earlier work was the documentary “Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade,” based on a book by Andrew Feinstein.
Grimonprez’s aim as a filmmaker is “an attempt to make sense of the wreckage wrought by history,” as he told “Cinema Scope” magazine in 2009, adding that his movies “speak to the need to see history at a distance, but at the same time to speak from inside it.”
Which is what he effectively and disturbingly accomplishes in his latest. We begin on the energetic note of drummer Max Roach assaulting his traps in a solo from his “Freedom Now Suite,” a video track from a 1964 Belgian program, intercut with titles quoting from Maya Angelou’s 1981 memoir The Heart of a Woman. She managed to meet many of the principals on the protest side of the events that unfold in the course of this two-and-a-half hour documentary.
And don’t worry that the film is too long. It takes exactly as much time as it needs to convey a complicated, terrifying, and almost-forgotten moment in history, but a moment that too-well demonstrated the ruthlessness of American foreign policy.
“President Eisenhower expresses his wish that Congolese Premier Lumumba would fall into a river of crocodiles,” reads a subsequent title. It’s a harbinger. In September 1960, sixteen African countries were admitted to the United Nations, following a continent-wide effort to break free of the colonial powers that had imposed themselves on these countries for decades. Such a move, of course, threatened the formerly white majority, but there were even more pressing issues. Some of those countries were sources of invaluable resources, over which the nuclear powers, especially, were not about to cede control.
Here’s a rough outline of key events. Following a conference in Belgium in late January, 1960, Congo’s independence was granted. It was formalized on June 30, 1960, in a ceremony at Léopoldville, as the capital of the country was then still known. The ceremony was attended by Belgian King Baudoin, who pledged support – but Lumumba, speaking unexpectedly, noted that independence had been a struggle against a reluctant Belgium. “We are proud of this struggle,” he said, “of tears, of fire, and of blood, to the depths of our being, for it was a noble and just struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force.” According to Time magazine, this was a “vicious attack,” an opinion echoed by others in the Western press.
Two weeks later, the area in south Congo known as Katanga declared its own independence, a move instigated by the mining company Union Minière and supported by the newly formed, Belgian-backed Katanga Gendarmerie. Katanga was a vital and strategic area, exporting copper and, you guessed it, uranium.
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| Patrice Lumumba |
Grimonprez collected an incredible array of video clips, allowing him to intercut events in Congo with UN proceedings and performances by the jazz musicians who often figure into the story. We see Abbey Lincoln singing alongside Max Roach's ensemble in the “Freedom Now Suite,” covering tracks from an album released at the end of 1960. The bop-fueled soundtrack also includes music from Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Nina Simone, Miriam Makeba, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus, among others, with a wry cameo from Duke Ellington. The musical portion eventually focuses on Louis Armstrong, who became an unwitting – and eventually unwilling – pawn in the proceedings.
A U.S. government-initiated “Jazz Ambassadors” program kicked off in 1956, with Gillespie among the first sent to tour the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and parts of Asia and Africa – wherever the threat of a Russian alliance might be perceived. Dave Brubeck, Simone, and Ellington are among those who followed. Then it was Armstrong’s turn, despite Satchmo’s surprising outspokenness.
In September 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called in the National Guard to keep nine Negro (as it was then styled) children from entering Central High School. Armstrong’s reaction to that action was especially outspoken. Louis told a young reporter that Faubus “was a no-good motherfucker,” but softened the epithet for print as “an ignorant plowboy.” And he added, “The way they’re treating my people in the south, the government can go to hell.” Armstrong’s anger made national headlines, and could well have been the reason that Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne Division a few days later to assure the students safe entry.
A few days later, Thurgood Marshall, then-president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told Mike Wallace that African Americans “have the full support of the Federal Government.” But, he added, “I do know the Negroes in New York all still say what Satchmo says. They were so happy about Satchmo’s outburst – because he’s the No. 1 Uncle Tom! The worst in the U. S.!” Ten years later, Marshall would become an associate justice on the Supreme Court.
Despite all this, Armstrong loved to entertain and believed that his international efforts helped to draw attention to his race. He agreed to perform in Congo during this time.
If your schoolbooks were anything like mine, none of this made its pages. With the Cold War in full swing when I was a student, anything remotely celebrating any degree of untoward socialism was expunged, so there was no mention of labor unions or Russia’s World War II participation, and we certainly learned nothing of the CIA’s black ops. And we sure as hell wouldn’t have heard any of the UN proceedings during the Congo controversy in which Russian premier Khrushchev offered the most sensible advice. But it’s presented here in this film, alongside similarly insightful comments by Fidel Castro and Malcolm X.
Don’t expect a predictably linear narrrative. It’s linear, yes, but spiked with the careful interspersals of seemingly disparate actualities, including contemporaneous commentary and, of course, music. The movie has a jagged rhythm, like one of the Max Roach drum solos that shows up at surprising moments.
After Lumumba’s visit to the UN in late July, 1960, where he met with Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, he insisted that the UN was interfering with his attempts to get rid of Belgian troops. Back home, Congo’s president, Joseph Kasa-Vubu, who’d been installed as a tenuous Lumumba ally, announced the dismissal of Lumumba in September. Lumumba refused to obey. The Congolese Parliament opposed Kasa-Vubu’s action, even as they grew increasingly troubled over Lumumba’s perceived authoritarianism.
Despite the increasing tension, Louis Armstrong landed in Léopoldville on October 28, 1960. Where 1,500 people were expected to show up, more than 100,000 people arrived. And the warring factions ceased firing for the duration of his concert. And that’s when CIA-backed Colonel Mobutu Sese Seko placed Lumumba under house arrest and installed a UN-sanctioned government. Armstrong, realizing he’d been used, expressed his bitterness.
When the news broke that Lumumba had been assassinated – news that became known some three weeks after the event – Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln were among the sixty protesters who invaded a subsequent UN Security Council meeting. You’ll see footage of it; you’ll appreciate the comparative uselessness of it. It wasn’t the UN that ordered the killing, although Hammarskjöld almost certainly was among those who signed off on it.
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But what if you happened upon proof as to who actually was responsible? That’s the dilemma faced by Gabriel Dax, protagonist of Boyd’s Gabriel’s Moon (and who shares an appropriate surname with Kirk Douglas’s Colonel Dax in the movie “Paths of Glory”), a British travel writer who happens to score an unexpected interview with Lumumba just after Congo’s independence. And he gets it on tape, which you know is going to mean trouble.
He guesses that there’s more to it – there has to be – but his own brother works for the Foreign Office, so he knows that such missions are carried out all time. And he could use the £200. As a travel writer, he always his some cash and keeps his passport on hand, and he’s used to dealing with border crossings. Not even very reluctantly, he agrees. There will be more missions, each a little more intricate and possibly dangerous than the last.
Meanwhile, Gabriel is dealing with chronic insomnia, brought on, he’s convinced, by a tragedy he suffered as a six-year-old, when his mother died in the house fire that he somehow managed to survive. He’s persuaded to begin a course of psychotherapy in an attempt to coax out whatever corner of his memory continues to plague him, a process that begins to resonate uncomfortably with those missions – but which may well offer him the tools to survive them.
To contain an event as formidable as the Lumumba assassination within a fictional thriller risks trivializing it, but I get no sense of that here. If anything, the pieces of actual history that run through the novel are offered respectfully and, as political realities, are none the less horrifying in this context. If anything, the conspiracy at the heart of it is all the more compelling because of its reality.
William Boyd was born in what became known as Ghana, and educated both in Africa and the U.K. He has remained fascinated with his natal country, which figured in his first novel, A Good Man in Africa, a darkly comic story in the Tom Sharpe mode; he has used African settings in several of the seventeen novels he has published since, part of a varied and always skillfully written catalogue that varies in genre and setting from book to book.
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“The” Congo used to be synonymous with our most racist imaginings. It was the place where dark savages skulked through the jungles. In one of his earliest film appearances, Louis Armstrong was placed in a racist cartoon jungle setting in the 1932 Max Fleischer cartoon “I'll Be Glad When You're Dead, You Rascal You”; fifteen years later, a popular song titled “Civilization” carried the happy-savages cliché further with the refrain
Bongo, bongo, bongo, I don't wanna leave the Congo, oh no no no no no,
Bingo, bangle, bungle, I so happy in the jungle, I refuse to go –
Don't want no bright lights, false teeth, doorbells, landlords, I make it clear
That no matter how they coax me – I stay right here.
It doesn’t appear at this point in history, as we slide backward into the always-open maw of race-hatred, that much improvement can be expected. At least this book and this documentary offer the company of enlightened thinkers.
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