In a previous blog post, I wrote a summary of the life of Patrice Émery Lumumba, who was a Congolese politician and also the first prime minister of the First Congolese Republic. Lumumba was known as a fierce nationalist who wanted Congo’s resources to be controlled by the people of Congo. He also refused to play a diplomatic game with Belgium and instead called out the sheer brutality of their colonial rule. The possibly apocryphal statement “Nous ne sommes plus vos singes” credited to Lumumba and directed at King Baudouin of Belgium summarises his legacy in this regard. The death toll under Leopold’s Congo is estimated to be over 10 million people, so Lumumba was unapologetic in wanting to free Congo of such brutal control. However, the substantial deposits of uranium and other resources under the Congolese earth made the Congo pivotal in the Cold War and made a mockery of any “granting of independence”. This post is a reflection on the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (2024), which explores this context and what led to the assassination of Lumumba. The documentary is both harrowing and exceedingly important to watch.
LARRY DEVLIN: And seated out on the terrace was a man I recognized. He said, “Well, you have to assassinate Lumumba.”
On 17 January 1961, with the complicity of the UN, US, Katanga and Belgian forces, Lumumba, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito were lined up against a tree and shot one at a time. The executors wished to get rid of the bodies and did so by digging up and dismembering the corpses, then dissolving them in sulphuric acid while the bones were ground and scattered. Angry groups protested Lumumba’s death across the world, in London, Beijing, Moscow, Dublin, Accra, Bombay, New Delhi, Paris, and Washington, D.C.. In Cairo, Egyptians burnt the Belgian embassy. In New York City, sixty protesters burst into the auditorium of the UN in protest, and a scuffle ensued. The protesters believed that, at the very least, the UN’s inaction contributed to the death of Lumumba. Lumumba’s tooth, a single gold-crowned molar, was taken as a trophy by a Belgian policeman, Gerard Soete, after the assassination in 1961. The tooth was kept for decades before being returned by Belgium to his family in June 2022 and laid to rest in Kinshasa.
Though no one has ever been charged or prosecuted for the killing of Patrice Lumumba, as of March 2026, a 93-year-old former Belgian diplomat, Étienne Davignon, has been ordered to stand trial for complicity in the murder. However, Vervoort tells us that while this “marks a historic step forward in the criminal prosecution of colonial crimes, it risks producing the illusion of a legally contained resolution of the colonial past – by individualizing responsibility for a structural crime and offering the Belgian state an opportunity for self-absolution.“
Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (2024), directed by Johan Grimonprez, blends historical archival footage with a jazz acoustic soundscape to background the geopolitical context of the CIA-backed overthrow and the 1961 assassination of Lumumba. While its flow is not necessarily sequential, it takes the context of the Cold War as its larger scenery to count down to the assassination and gestures beyond that to the current permacrisis in the region. This blog post makes 8 observations about the content of the documentary to comment on what it evokes intellectually, politically and, very much so, emotionally. Soundtrack is a hard watch. If you have not yet watched it, you should prepare yourself for the blasé brutality of imperial domination in its language, its tone and its means. I also think that you must watch it to understand quite clearly the colonial structure of our current world. How we live in the colonial ever-present.
In the 2025/26 academic year, we used this documentary as required material for one of my classes. The core focus we had was how its narrative made us question the idea that we can restrict our definition of decolonisation to the “granting of independence to the previously colonised”. Especially because every word within those quotation marks is contestable. This is something that I have discussed elsewhere on this blog in my essay on the problems with defining decolonisation without a critical look at the history of decolonisation.
A good companion piece for Soundtrack is King Leopold’s Ghost (2006), which details King Leopold II of Belgium’s brutal, genocidal and personal control of the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908. It documents how his regime exploited the region for rubber and ivory using slave labour, torture, and mutilation, resulting in millions of deaths. Lumumba’s “crime” for which he was assassinated was wanting the Congo to control its own resources.
Past is prologue: Where are we now?
Now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the country holds over 50% of global cobalt reserves and leads in coltan production, which are crucial for electronics and EV batteries. It is also a major producer of copper, industrial diamonds, gold, tin, tungsten, and tantalum. Our “modern” lives are powered by the subjugation of Congo – our phones, laptops, televisions, electric vehicles… AI. When Nelson Maldonado-Torres tells us that “as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and every day”, he is gesturing to the fact that what we consider to be modernity and its benefits are (and have always been) built on the brutal exploitation and extraction of human and other resources from those cast into the zone of non-being – the wretched and damned of the earth. Estimates of deaths in the DRC due to conflict, disease, and malnutrition from 1996 to the present frequently reach 6 million. The DRC is often described as the “Rape Capital of the World.” More than 35,000 cases of child rape and sexual assault were recorded in DRC in the first nine months of 2025; 45,000 cases against children were recorded in the whole of 2024. The 2023 Global Slavery Index estimated 407,000 people were in modern slavery in the DRC in 2021. This includes forced labour in agriculture, domestic service, and mining. International companies making massive profits often offer limited protection to the people and the environment, ignore unjust labour practices, enable human rights abuses, fail to pay tax and engage in unconscionable acts like evictions and pollutions. What’s past is truly prologue.
Where did all the thorny flowers go? Endnotes and death notes
There were many enablers of assassination covered by the documentary. I focus here on three. Firstly, Moise Tshombe was the president of the secessionist African state of Katanga, and later the premier of the United Congo Republic. The documentary explains how he was a pawn in Belgium’s plan to remove Lumumba. Tshombe hired mercenaries to bomb Congolese villages that resisted. When he was ousted, he fled to Spain in 1963. On 30 June 1967, an aircraft carrying him was hijacked by Francis Bodenan. He was taken to Algeria, jailed, and placed under house arrest. His supporters included Marvin Liebman and William F. Buckley, who pressed for his release and return to Spain. Tshombe died in 1969. In prison.
After Congo gained independence in 1960, Joseph Kasa-Vubu assumed the mostly symbolic role of president. He was instrumental in the international collusion to remove Lumumba, which led to a constitutional crisis. Despite Congo’s stating that Lumumba was the PM, the UN seated Kasa-Vubu as leader at the General Assembly. Kasa-Vubu supported Mobutu’s initial coup and facilitated Tshombe’s rise to prime minister in 1964. After his second and final government overthrow in 1965, Mobutu placed Kasa-Vubu under house arrest but eventually permitted him to retire on his farm in Mayombe. Four years later, in 1969, Kasa-Vubu died in a hospital in Boma, possibly after a prolonged illness.
During all of this, Dag Hammarskjöld was the Secretary General of the United Nations. He was a Swedish economist and diplomat. In the documentary, he answers a summons by the king of Belgium to explain why the situation in the mineral-rich Katanga has not been brought under control to the king’s satisfaction. He also flew to Elisabethville to meet Tshombe “over Lumumba’s head, almost literally”. Hammarskjöld had met with Lumumba earlier on at the UN headquarters in New York on July 24, 1960, in the initial stages of the “Congo crisis”. But that was the last time they met. Hammarskjöld died on September 18, 1961, when his plane crashed near Ndola (now Zambia). Although it is formally classified as an aviation accident, suspicions of sabotage or an attack have kept investigations active for decades, with possible connections to foreign intelligence agencies or mining corporations under consideration. United Nations enquiries have continued into the 21st century.
The women who hold up half the sky of the revolution
In contrast to the feeble rogues’ gallery above, the most striking figure to emerge from the documentary is that of Andrée Blouin. Her full story is told in My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria. Described as the “woman behind Lumumba”, Blouin was born in the Central African Republic in 1921 and spent her early years in an orphanage for “mixed race” children in Brazzaville in the French Congo. Later, she headed the women’s wing of the independence movement and became Lumumba’s Chief of Protocol at independence in June of 1960. She was one of his firmest supporters. We are introduced to her in Soundtrack in her own words,
“I was rushed onto the plane feeling death on my heels.”
Her role in supporting Lumumba is covered in the documentary, as well as her forced exile, with her family held hostage in exchange for her silence. Also covered were the attempts on her life. Nevertheless, she was not discouraged. She says:
“Twice, I was nearly murdered. But this did not deter me from my purpose. On the contrary, I felt an extraordinary sense of being alive. It only reinforced the will to fight for my people.”
It seems that death was on her heels her whole life. But she never let that stop her. Before she was a political activist, colonialism had already served death to her on its platter. When he was two years of age, Andrée Blouin’s son René fell ill with malaria but was refused the lifesaving quinine medication in local hospitals because “the French colonial administration insisted” that it was for “Europeans only”… before long, he died…
Towards the end of the documentary, we are introduced to Wassis Hortense Léonie Abo, an activist, soldier and eventually a writer. She tells a story of having to escape the military with other women soldiers by hiding in a river all night. The song they sing during this is translated:
“They lied when we were told that women aren’t strong. But through what we lived, we realized that women are strong.”
Immediately after her song, we hear the voice of Allen Dulles: “I think we overrated the Soviet danger in the Congo.” The danger was characterised by hyperbole, fabrication and caricature. What they underrated was the women of the Congo – the women who hold up half the sky and all of the hope.
They too are the earth: The meaning and means of civilised modernity
At the heart of the Congo crisis was a desire to hold on to a performative vision of modernity, in which Africa remains home for human and mineral resources, and the First and Second Worlds fight over those resources. One of the NATO soldiers in the documentary tells us, “I’m fighting in Africa for freedom and democracy.” He considers himself “civilised” because he attended piano concerts at the Goethe-Institut and appreciates “good music”. In his own words, “He is not just a man who kills ni****s.” But he is a man. Who kills. With no compunction. The music does not save him. There is a deep racism at the core of his civilisation. But this civilised European soldier does not stand alone in this. Media and politicians in the West, in light of Lumumba’s belief in the right of the Congolese to political, social and economic self-determination, characterised him as insane, arrogant, overly ambitious, and even satanic. Till Lumumba was no longer of the earth. But: Are they of this earth… Who live that earth may die?
We too are in time: The persistent denial of coevalness
Euro-modern engagement with Africa and the global majority is underlined by a persistent denial of coevalness. Johannes Fabian coined the term “denial of coevalness” as a move that locates difference as “there and then”, as distant in both space and time from the modern European self. In essence, it is a way of seeing the world in which various contemporary societies are interpreted as literally living in a different historical epoch. How else can you explain that one could, for the purposes of extraction, justify not just the killing of Lumumba but the wanton destruction of lives in Congo that continues to this day? The persistent denial of coevalness entails the creation of a specific translation of modernity, which dislocates bodies from space and time. They are not modern. They are not here. So, they are not here. They call the colonised’s customs and practices “timeless”. ‘Timeless’ means being out of time or without time.
The use of mercenaries for extractive destruction in the Congo is notorious. As is the destruction they left behind. A journalist in the documentary notes:
“I was losing count of the number of burnt-out villages. However much you may distrust the emotion of moral indignation, there will be times when it hits you. It hit me. Not at the sight of the roofless village but at the friendly wave of the white officer in charge of these operations.”
Yet, we too are in time. Even when we are out of time.
Remembering, dismembering, misremembering
What strikes me most clearly when I talk to people about Lumumba is how much people do not know about him. His erasure from the history books adds to the crime committed against him. How much do you need to fear someone to kill them, then dismember their body and then dissolve it in acid? He was erased on so many levels. The coloniser has always tried to dislocate his temporalities from the colonised, such that the memory of the colonial-enslavement project, as a key player in the emergence of modernity, is simultaneously erased and preserved. If we remember Lumumba, how quietly would we accede to the false promises of colonial modernity? The control of memory is a temporal tool of colonial domination that maintains the hierarchies, accretions, erasures, and realities created during formal colonisation. But memory is like smoke; it cannot be hidden under a calabash. Lumumba’s blood cries out. Yes, we live in yesterday’s memories of law and order, and those memories cannot easily be hidden, dismembered, or dissolved in acid. And so, we remember Lumumba. Still, we remember.
The Still (dis)United Nations: Where Decolonisation was Untimely Ripped & Unripely Born
But the United Nations chooses to forget and continues to betray its hope. In the documentary, a news reporter stated that “The only way to keep the Cold War out of the Congo is to keep the United Nations in the Congo.” The United Nations was kept in Congo. The Cold War was not kept out. The documentary tells us how, even within the UN, there was complicity in the Congo Crisis: “If there was any “Cabinet” for the Congo operation, it was not the Security Council but the highly informal Congo Club on the 38th Floor.” This also refers to the establishment of the United Nations Operation in the Congo (ONUC). ONUC peacekeepers maintained a guard at Lumumba’s residence in Leopoldville but did not intervene during his subsequent arrest and transport to Katanga, where he was killed.
The UN continues to promise protection of human rights to the colonised, racialised and indigenous peoples of the world. That promise, despite its Resolutions and Declarations, remains declarative and unfulfilled.
On December 14, 1960, at the height of the Congo crisis, the UNGA Resolution 1514 (XV) was adopted: the “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples”. It proclaimed that colonialism must end unconditionally, declaring that subjection to foreign domination is a denial of human rights and contrary to the UN Charter. It solidified the right of all peoples to self-determination and accelerated global decolonisation. Just over a month later, Lumumba was killed. Promise unfulfilled.
66 years later, on the 25th of March 2026, the UN General Assembly adopted a Declaration naming the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest Crime Against Humanity. 123 countries voted in favour, 3 against (USA, Israel, Argentina), and there were 52 abstentions (including the UK/EU); see the graphic below. The non-binding resolution emphasises reparations, healing, and addressing modern inequalities. The Global Majority, in large part, thought this sounded like a good idea. The countries that had historically and consistently benefited from the extractive colonial project did not. Promise unfulfilled.
The juxtaposition of these two resolutions demonstrates the performative and declarative nature of the United Nations. It also illustrates how the language of anticolonial agitation continues to be co-opted to label as “decolonisation” the use of law to grant administrative control of these colonial constructs to local representatives in ways that do not result in reparations, remembering, healing, or addressing modern inequalities. The fact that recognition as states and agreement to the first resolution required the adoption of Euro-modern legal principles signals how continuous and uninterrupted colonial structures of power continue to be. Promise unfulfilled.
Soundtrack and lyrics from a stillborn revolution… which may yet be revived
And so, we come to the final observation: the promise of independence, freedom, sovereignty and peace remains unfulfilled. The law and its institutions have not delivered on their promises to those who cry out to them. The law is not enough. The law has never been enough. The law will never be enough. So, what can we do? I reach for Arundhati Roy’s words instead:
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible; she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” Arundhati Roy, War Talk
Johan Grimonprez uses jazz to tell his story of Lumumba. Across space and time, racialised, colonised, and indigenous peoples have insisted on using their bodies, their lives, and their art to tell their stories. As Sinzo Aanza wrote on Facebook on 19 May 2020, without art, Congo is nothing but a mine. But with art, we hold a million memories in our hearts and minds.
Lumumba is remembered in the lyrics of Liwa Ya Émery by Franco Luambo:
“Lumumba, if you can hear me
Come back even for the last time
So, we can praise you in the name of Uhuru
Oh, who will raise his children?”
And maybe he did come back, or never even left. Because, through Grimonprez, he is remembered again. So, we remember Lumumba. We remember all those who have gone ahead of us. We remember that with our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories – we can continue to lay siege to empire.
