Back in 1960, sixteen newly independent African nations joined the United Nations, flipping the balance of power from the colonial powers to the global south—a massive shake-up. The Congo quickly became the battleground for control over the UN. Picture this: Nikita Khrushchev famously pounding his shoe at the UN, furious over the neo-colonial exploitation of Congo’s resources, while African delegates faced underhanded threats and blackmail. Then came the shocking assassination of Patrice Lumumba, which managed to rally the Afro-Asian bloc into demanding global decolonization from the UN General Assembly.
In his gripping documentary, Johan Grimonprez dives into these events and floats an intriguing theory: the U.S. may have used jazz icon Louis Armstrong as part of a covert “cool war” strategy tied to Lumumba’s murder.
Grimonprez, whose earlier work includes the quirky Double Take (imagining two Alfred Hitchcocks meeting), now zooms in on the tense politics surrounding Lumumba’s assassination in 1961. His film hints that the U.S., the UN, and Belgium (Congo’s former colonial ruler) were all complicit. Why? To keep Congo’s uranium—key for nuclear weapons—out of Soviet hands. Lumumba’s support for a pan-African movement also had the Eisenhower administration on edge.
Using a mix of archival footage, interviews, text, and music, the documentary explores how Armstrong’s hugely popular African tour in the early ’60s—funded by the U.S. State Department—gave CIA operatives convenient cover. With Armstrong in town, white foreigners became less suspicious.
For their part, the musicians were wary of being used as pawns. Armstrong, for instance, had previously declined a State Department-sponsored trip to Russia for similar reasons and grew skeptical of this African tour. Still, they found meaning in jazz as a cultural bridge between African anti-colonialism and the civil rights movement back in the U.S., even as the Soviets dismissed jazz as frivolous.
The film has the overarching air of thriller, pulling viewers in with a collision of culture, politics and jazz.
It is in UK cinemas from November 15.
