Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, Elephant Cargo © British Pathé.

After my latest feature, Shadow World (2016), took me around the world to document the murky reality of the international arms trade, I felt it was time to dig into the shadow side of my own Belgian colonial past. Shadow World exposed how the interests of the military industrial complex, arms dealers, banks, mining companies, and politicians are intertwined in a corporatocracy that ultimately defines foreign policy. War, and its constant threat, turns out to be a great crank of what is called the free market economy.

Although it is now common knowledge that Belgium has been guilty of atrocities of historic proportions, the period surrounding the Congolese declaration of independence was still talked about in veiled terms. When we started our research eight years ago, it soon became clear that the events of 1960 mirror those of today.

As I immersed myself in the material, I came across several historical figures who, in the Belgian history books, had been labeled as villains. The more I learned about them, however, the clearer it became that they were not who we were led to believe.

One of the most important characters in the story of Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is that of Andrée Blouin. Blouin, the daughter of a French father and a Banziri mother, was a passionate activist, gifted orator, and key advisor to the leaders of the emerging Pan-African movement. She believed a united Africa to be the best path to a truly independent Africa. She came to Congo to help with the election campaign of the Mouvement National Congolais of Patrice Lumumba. Once there, she started a large emancipatory women's movement, which, although women were not allowed to vote, contributed greatly to Lumumba’s popularity, and ultimately gained him the position of first premier of the newly independent Congo.

It is not surprising that the Belgian secret service tried to neutralize Blouin's influence by portraying her as a communist, as the “courtesan” of the political leaders she advised, or even as a cunning femme fatale who was out to take every woman’s man. When these smear campaigns proved ineffective, and Lumumba’s victory became apparent, the Belgians expelled Blouin from the country, some days before independence. In her memoirs she explains how she managed to use her expulsion as a weapon in the fight against the treacherous regime: before boarding the plane, she hid a secret document in her chignon. On arrival to Europe this document would prove that it was not Joseph Kasa Vubu (Belgium’s favored candidate) but Lumumba who had the constitutional right to form the government. As a result, Belgium could no longer deny Lumumba's election victory.

In the film, Blouin's words, read by Belgian Congolese musician Marie Daulne, better known as Zap Mama (herself a daughter of a Belgian father and a Congolese mother), represent the dream of a united, independent Africa. Blouin’s story runs side by side with that of Lumumba, who chose her to be his chief of protocol (and speech writer). Throughout her life she was in close contact with many other African leaders, from Kwame Nkrumah to Ahmed Sékou-Touré, Modibo Keïta, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Ahmed Ben Bella. After the coup d’état against Lumumba’s government, she was again expelled from the country. She then spent some time in Algeria, after which she moved to Paris, where her house became a hub of the European Pan-African movement. She died there in 1986. Her memoir is about to be re-published this year.

Another figure who is often differently portrayed than how I came to know him is Soviet chairman Nikita Khrushchev. The moment he demonstratively bangs his shoe on the table of the UN General Assembly is always presented as proof that he was a brutish clown, a villain. I, however, came to see this act as a performative expression of his indignation at how the United States had corrupted the UN policy in Congo. In September, 1960, it was Khrushchev himself who asked the world leaders to come to the UN summit in New York to speak out together against colonization. It was Khrushchev who called UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld a “lackey of the imperialists” after his double-dealing in the Congo, which led to Lumumba’s downfall. Slamming his shoe, Khrushchev urged that the Swedish Secretary-General, whose family had invested in Congolese mines, be replaced by a “troika” of Secretary-Generals, each capable of representing what he saw as the three great power blocs: The Communists, The Capitalists and Non-Aligned/Neutral Nations. Although it is usually pretended that this action had no consequences (the troika never materialized), it did set a lot of things in motion. For one, the anti-colonial resolution introduced by Khrushchev was subsequently ratified when it was re-submitted by an Afro-Asian coalition. As more and more non-western nations entered the UN, Hammarskjöld realized that he had to diversify his directorate. He henceforth made sure that his entourage would also include diplomats from non-Western backgrounds.

Conor Cruise O'Brien, an Irish diplomat, was commissioned by Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld to lead the UN Peacekeeping Mission in Katanga. Cruise O’Brien’s 1962 memoir “To Katanga and Back: A UN Case History” sheds new light on the dark history of the United Nations. Because of Cruise O’Brien’s Irish background, the desire for independence was not unfamiliar to him, and his quirky personality made him less likely to bow to pressure from above. In his book, O'Brien describes the Balubakat genocide — a mass murder at the hands of Belgian, French, German and South African mercenaries — as “the Vietnam of Belgium.” Rarely has the way in which great powers use the UN to influence foreign policy been better documented.

In 1956, just before Ghana was declared independent, Louis Armstrong played to a packed house in Accra for, among others, Kwame Nkrumah, the future president of Ghana. Four years later, Armstrong landed in Congo during a tour organized by the US State Department. His presence caused a spontaneous truce in the battle that was the result of Belgium’s attempt to grasp back control over its old colony. It was a battle that started only weeks after the independence ceremony. From Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) Armstrong traveled to Katanga to perform for the UN troops that had been installed there to help expel the Belgian soldiers. Recent research revealed that Armstrong was used by the CIA as a Trojan horse in Katanga. During Armstrong's visit, 1500 tonnes of high-grade uranium lay above the ground in Katanga. As the CIA was afraid that the Soviet Union would find out, they used Armstrong's concert as a cover to prepare the uranium transport to the US undetected. Nevertheless, Armstrong was not only the unwitting pawn of the American political agenda; there were moments when the great performer stopped smiling and spoke out: He refused to play for a segregated audience in South Africa and when the National Guard was sent to Little Rock, Arkansas, to prevent black students from entering, Armstrong canceled his tour as jazz ambassador to Russia with the words, "The government can go to hell."

Art institutions like the Museum of Modern Art were CIA hotbeds. Radio, and later TV, were systematically deployed to distract audiences from foreign interventions that might cause outrage. A good example is the Belgian King Baudouin deploying his personal life as a smokescreen for unfolding atrocities in Congo. The key moments in the attack on the newly independent democracy were all buried with news about King Baudouin going to Hollywood, then “meeting,” then getting engaged to, and finally marrying Doña Fabiola de Mora y Aragón.

Another principal voice in the polyphonic choir of Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is Malcolm X. After Fidel Castro was kicked out of his Manhattan hotel, Malcolm X invited him to come to Harlem’s Hotel Theresa. When leaders of the global south came to Harlem to visit Castro, Hotel Theresa became the summit of an alternative UN. X referred to it as a “Bandung Conference” in Harlem. In an attempt to drag the United States in front of the international court for violations of human rights, he traveled to Africa to ask African leaders for support. It was X himself who said “as long as we think that we should get Mississippi straightened out before we worry about the Congo, you'll never get Mississippi straightened out — not until you start realizing your connection with the Congo.”

Finally there is what Congolese novelist In Koli Jean Bofane refers to in the film as an ever-evolving “algorithm of Congo Inc.: an algorithm perfected somewhere between Washington, London, Brussels and Kigali, where Congo Inc. has become the global supplier delivering strategic minerals to take war into space.” The thesis of Congo Inc. is that every major war largely consumed and was able to be fought thanks to minerals that were provided by the Congo. In the First World War it was rubber; during the Second World War the high-grade uranium only found in the Congo at the time was essential to build the first atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; in Vietnam it was the copper of the endless bullets that were shipped there; and now the strategic materials to take war into space.

The film became very much a dialogue and a collaborative effort with both Eve Blouin (daughter of Andrée Blouin) and In Koli Jean Bofane, who so generously let us include their personal family images and home movies that were indispensable in building the intimate poetry of the film.

Never-before-released interviews were specially sourced for the film. These include Patrice Lumumba’s speeches, which were presumably lost, but discovered in the basement of the Africa Museum in Brussels. Furthermore, a collaboration with Planet Ilunga helped us to source historical Rumba music tracks that were restored from collectible discs.