CRG African Film Night screening: Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, directed by Johan Grimonprez (2024)

This special edition, organised by the African Library in collaboration with the African Studies Centre’s Collaborative Research Group ‘Africa in the World’, presents Johan Grimonprez's multi-award-winning documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat (2024), featuring a top cast of historical figures and jazz icons through archival footage, including Patrice Lumumba, Andrée Blouin, Louis Armstrong, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone, John Coltrane, Nikita Khrushchev, and Dag Hammarskjöld.

Before the screening, Mayke Kaag, Professor of the Anthropology of Politics and Governance in Africa and convenor of the CRG ‘Africa in the World’, will give a short introduction.

Synopsis: “United Nations, 1960: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, jazz musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe, and the U.S. State Department swings into action, sending jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to Congo to deflect attention from the CIA-backed coup. Director Johan Grimonprez captures the moment when African politics and American jazz collided in this magnificent essay film, a riveting historical rollercoaster that illuminates the political machinations behind the 1961 assassination of Congo's leader Patrice Lumumba. Richly illustrated by eyewitness accounts, official government memos, testimonies from mercenaries and CIA operatives, speeches from Lumumba himself, and a veritable canon of jazz icons, Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat interrogates colonial history to tell an urgent and timely story of precedent that resonates more than ever in today's geopolitical climate.”

  Open to Leiden University students, staff, and affiliates (no registration required).