Frann Michel recommends the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, directed by Belgian media artist Johan Grimonprez, and available streaming through kanopy via the Multnomah County Library.
The film opens with, and returns to, the moment in February 1961 when singer Abbey Lincoln, drummer Max Roach, and 58 other protesters disrupted a meeting of the UN Security Council to protest the murder of Patrice Lumumba. The first Prime Minister of the newly independent Democratic Republic of Congo, Lumumba was deposed and killed with the involvement of the CIA. During the neocolonial Congo Crisis, a proxy conflict in the Cold War, the US had sent African American musicians on tour as "Jazz Ambassadors." The film interweaves music, archival footage, and readings from texts by Central African Republic politician and women’s rights activist Andrée Blouin, Irish diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien, Belgian-Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane, and Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev.
Fair use image: Poster for the film Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, with colorful, stylish text and a black-and-white photo of Andrée Blouin and others in an automobile.
- KBOO