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MAKING FILMS AGAINST AMNESIA  
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Zahra Moloo interviews Johan Gimonprez
April 1, 2025
Africa is a Country
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_ The director of the Oscar-nominated film 'Soundtrack to a Coup
d’Etat' reflects on imperial violence, corporate warfare, and how
cinema can disrupt the official record—and help us remember
differently. _

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Johan Grimonprez is the director of the Oscar-nominated
documentary _Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat_, a film whose main theme
is the assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in
1961. The film takes place against a much larger historical backdrop
that includes the Cold War, the independence of a number African and
Asian countries and their entry into the United Nations, the
Non-Aligned Movement, American imperialism, and, most importantly, the
export of jazz music played by prominent African American musicians as
a strategy of spreading American imperialism abroad.

Grimonprez spoke to Zahra Moloo about the archival depth of the film,
the complicity of institutions like the UN, and how music—both jazz
and Congolese rumba—became a site of ideological struggle during the
Cold War.

ZM

Thank you, Johan, for speaking to me about this incredible, sweeping
documentary. I’d like to start off by asking, where did your journey
into making this film begin?

JG

I can trace it back to the research for the previous film, _Shadow
World_, where we dissected the global arms industry, together with
Andrew Feinstein, who published a book, _The Shadow World: Inside the
Global Arms Trade_. We interviewed several characters for the film,
including Chris Hedges, former war correspondent for _The New York
Times_, who lost his job because he was speaking out against the
invasion of Iraq under Bush. He talked about a template within
politics, “the corporatocracy,” that basically we are undergoing a
corporate coup d’etat in slow motion. War has been privatized, and
it’s the lobby industry’s revolving door that dictates foreign
policy.

After finishing this film, I wanted to dig into the backyard of my own
country, Belgium, and a black page out of the history of my country is
in relation to the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was a Belgian
colony and in the beginning was the private property of the king. I
began digging into that story and stumbled onto the fact that the
assassination of Patrice Lumumba was very much traceable to that
corporatocracy, where the Belgian mining industry in cahoots with the
CIA in 1960 was responsible for the overthrow of his democratically
elected government and his subsequent assassination.

Then there was also the figure of Nikita Khrushchev, who figured in a
previous film _Double Take_, where he functions as a Hitchcock
doppelgänger. As a kid of the ’60s, a TV-generation kid, you know,
I was born in Belgium, jammed between East and West. At the time, the
ideological divide between communism and capitalism divided the world.
The figure of Nikita Khrushchev figured prominently in that previous
film, and I had always known about the slamming of the shoe at the
United Nations, but what I did not realize is that it had to do with
the history of my country, with the Belgian Congo, and that Nikita
Khrushchev was, in essence, calling for the resignation of the then
secretary-general of the UN, Dag Hammarskjöld, for his dealing with
the Congo crisis. And Hammarskjöld was banding together with the
king, with the monarchy, and the Union Minière mining industry to
overthrow Patrice Lumumba.

ZM

What was striking to me about this documentary is the depth of
research and the rich content of the archive. You have excerpts from
books by Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane, Conor Cruise O’Brien
who was Ireland’s permanent representative to the UN and was also in
Katanga, audio memoirs from Nikita Khrushchev. You have passages from
Frantz Fanon, telegrams from the Belgians about the plot to
assassinate Lumumba. The film archive is also very rich: interviews
with Lumumbist rebels like Léonie Abo, interviews with British
intelligence, mercenaries, with the CIA. How was the process of
finding this material—both the text and images? Was any of this
material difficult to get a hold of?

JG

Well, with documentary most of the historical actors or the things
that we feature in the film or the archive, the writing happens in the
editing. As you go along, you construct a film with the archives and
try to combine and layer several elements. This took four or five
years of research, and the editing was four years. But then there are
things that you stumble upon that you didn’t even know existed. 
For example, there was William Burden, the president of the Museum of
Modern Art (MOMA), the CEO of Lockheed, advisor to the Pentagon, and
he had stakes in the mining industry in eastern Congo. Then he was
appointed the US ambassador to Brussels just prior to Congo becoming
independent, and on top of that, he was a secret CIA agent and
befriended Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA. In his audio memoirs,
which we sourced from the Department of Diplomatic Studies at Columbia
University, he literally says, “Belgium is toying with the idea of
assassinating Lumumba, and I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea
either.” This is coming from a US ambassador, even president of the
MOMA for that matter. And he says “Patrice Lumumba was such a damn
nuisance, it was pretty obvious to go for a political
assassination.” I fell from my chair when I heard his words. This is
firsthand audio, documentation that was never meant to be released,
but it was part of study material for the Diplomatic Studies
Department, where being a secret agent is apparently a part of that.

We had to redirect the film and place this material fairly prominently
in the middle of the film when the whole shift changes. The film leads
up from the nonaligned countries, to the pre-1960s, then to the 15th
UN General Assembly, where 16 African countries become independent. A
whole wind of independence is blowing over the continent, and the
African and Afro-Asian bloc gains the majority vote in the UN and
against the backdrop of that, you have the West and Belgium deciding
to deal with this wind of freedom by a neocolonial grab—in essence,
trying to keep a hold of the reaches of the continent of Africa.

But the archive consists of much more. I often allude to Georges
Nzongola-Ntalaja, who wrote a history of the Congo and says, “If we
want to rewrite a history of our country, maybe we should call for
decolonization of the archives as well.” To source the history of
the Congo, you have to go to Brussels, for the images you have to go
to the African Museum or even Belgian television. Then another big
component is the home movies that we were able to source from Sergei
Krushchev, who filmed his father, Nikita Khrushchev, and the home
movies of In Koli Jean Bofane, who was reading from his book _Congo
Inc._ When we were trying to get the story of Andrée Blouin, her
memoirs were hard to find. We got in touch with her daughter Eve
Blouin, who generously agreed that we could use the memoirs. She sent
us an undeveloped roll of film, and when we developed it, we saw
Andrée with Eve Blouin herself as a two-year-old kid in Leopoldville
while Andrée was working for Lumumba, the first democratically
elected prime minister of the independent Congo. It’s the very
moment where, about a couple of weeks later, Andrée was exiled and
Eve Blouin was held at ransom in Leopoldville. Here you feel the
heartbeat of history with those home movies; you have firsthand images
of characters involved with that history. Those intimate images are in
contradiction and juxtaposition with the bigger global political
events that were happening at that time.

ZM

One of the central themes of the film is the strategic use of jazz and
Black American jazz musicians as a weapon in the arsenal of American
imperialism. At the same time, Black Americans were being subjected to
segregation in the US. Musicians like Louis Armstrong, Nina
Simone_, _and Dizzy Gillespie were used as emissaries of the US in
Africa and Asia. _ _Dizzy does a tour of the Middle East—which
kicks off in honor of the Shah in Iran in 1956. He says, “I would be
a better emissary than Kissinger.” Later on, Louis Armstrong goes to
the DRC, to play in front of thousands of people, but this concert is
actually a smokescreen while Lumumba’s assassination is being
planned by CIA agents. Can you talk more about the use of jazz as a
strategy of American imperialism, and why did some musicians go along
with it? We get a sense that they had some idea of what was going on
for instance in the case of Dizzy Gillespie.

JG

It’s very schizophrenic, because they were used as tools to
propagate and defend democracy while at home they were not allowed to
vote, they were second-rate citizens. As Dizzy says, “I didn’t go
over there to sugarcoat segregation back home.” Louis Armstrong in
1956 was sent out, and it is Edward Murrow who films him, and later on
becomes the director of the United States Information Agency, which
was sponsored by the US State Department and using soft power as a way
to defend democracy. On another level you could talk about Hollywood
in a similar way, how it seduced the rest of the world. Heiner Müller
at one point in East Berlin said, “The most powerful message we got
from the West was actually the commercials.” It was not strong
power; it was soft power. It was the seduction element.

In 1956, when Edward Murrow accompanies Louis Armstrong to Ghana, it
is amazing, because while he’s a second-rate citizen back home,
he’s celebrated by an audience of 100,000 Ghanaians in Accra. And
wherever he went, even if he was being used as a tool, he was also
outspoken. At one point during the Africa tour, he refused to play for
an apartheid audience in South Africa. To contextualize it a bit,
there was this huge shift in the United Nations with the influx of all
the independent countries, the Afro-Asian bloc. Nikita Krushchev was
proposing a decolonization vote, while the United States was sending
arm twisters into the UNGA to buy up African votes and also sending
jazz ambassadors to win the hearts and minds of people in Africa.
Louis Armstrong was one of them.

But these jazz ambassadors were not always in the know. Louis
Armstrong was sent to Katanga, which was seceding from the Congo with
the financial aid of Union Minière that paid billions to prop up
Moïse Tshombe’s government. It was not ratified internationally, so
it was illegal to even send US ambassadors, but it was the Katanga
lobby and the CEO of Union Minière who pushed for Louis Armstrong to
be sent to Katanga. And when he arrived, he was lodged at Moïse
Tshombe’s presidential villa and was having dinner with Larry
Devlin, the head of the CIA, and also Ambassador Timberlake, who was
the US ambassador to the Congo, and Belgian advisors, amongst them
Harold Charles Lyndon, who was the minister of African affairs. And
here is Louis Armstrong facing Larry Devlin, but not knowing that
he’s the head of the CIA in the Congo, because he was undercover as
an agricultural advisor. Seated around that dinner table, in November
1960, Armstrong grilled Moïse Tshombe and said, “Hey, you’re in
bed with big money.” We found an audio interview with Trummy Young,
who was a trombonist for the All Stars that accompanied Louis
Armstrong to Katanga, and he said, “We felt all of this was not
quite right.” So they were in the know, but they were not in the
know about just how insidious it was that Armstrong was actually
having dinner with the very person plotting the murder of Patrice
Lumumba, together with the Belgians.

ZM

Your film also includes Congolese rumba music as part of the
soundtrack —some of the iconic bands at the time, Franco Luambo, and
TPOK Jazz, and Joseph Kabasele. Those relations were schizophrenic as
well. For instance, Franco Luambo, possibly the most famous Congolese
musician of all time, had this song “Lumumba héro national.” But
he also sang for and received a lot of support from Mobutu. Can you
tell me more about the relationship between Congolese musicians and
politics? Did it mirror the relation between American jazz musicians
and politics?

JG

The film dissects the jazz ambassadors and how they were used as a
propaganda tool, but there is also the role of Abbey Lincoln and Max
Roach and their album _We Insist!_  that was broadcast on Belgian
television. It is Abbey Lincoln, together with the Women’s Writers
Coalition in Harlem, writer Maya Angelou, and the playwright Rosa Guy
who called for a protest at the United Nations Security Council when
Adlai Stevenson, the US ambassador [to the UN] under Kennedy,
announces that Patrice Lumumba was murdered with two of his
colleagues. They literally crash the Security Council, stand up, and
scream. So there is also another element to the music and jazz, how
jazz was inspired by that freedom movement to become part of the Civil
Rights Movement. All of that is not separate. For example, one track
from the _We Insist!_, “Tears for Johannesburg,” was inspired by
African women tearing up their apartheid passport in South Africa,
which became a protest that was smashed down in Sharpeville, where
women were killed.

So there’s a back and forth between how the liberation and
independence movements on the continent were inspiring the Civil
Rights Movement, but also inspiring jazz. So it’s not just that
music is being used as an instrument, but also music becomes a tool of
rebellion to speak out. Even if it’s a scream at the very end of the
film, it’s a scream of resilience, of not agreeing with the state of
the world.

With rumba it was similar. There is also a back and forth between what
was going on with fourth, fifth, sixth generations of Congolese, who
during the transatlantic passage made it to Cuba, and the music in
Cuba, inspired by Congolese heritage—conga, rumba, chacha—made it
back to Leopoldville. There was a trade where musicians were working
on the ships and were going back and forth between Havana and
Leopoldville, and that inspired rumba in the Congo.

And the rumba was also very much inspiring how they lived and what was
going on, sometimes in subdued terms. You know, the first rumba track
featured in the film, “Sooner or Later, the World Will Change” by
Adou Elenga, was very much a protest song banned by the Belgian
colonialists, and Adou Elenga was put in prison. So there’s a
connection between the politics and how one stands in the world. If
you’re a suppressed, colonized country, you cannot not but give
expression to your emotions. During the independence movement, when
Patrice Lumumba was not yet prime minister, he hired Rock-a-Mambo as a
way to raise consciousness and talk about independence, going from bar
to bar in the Cité. which was the native neighborhood of
Leopoldville. In 1960, when the round table was organized in Brussels
to talk about independence, the Belgians were thinking, _We’re
going to give independence in a couple of decades_. But unanimously,
all the political Congolese parties were arguing that independence
should be given much more rapidly. There was a call to release Patrice
Lumumba, and when he arrived around the 25th of January 1960, he was
accompanied by Joseph Kabasele, Docteur Nico, and African Jazz, and
when towards the end of the month of January they claimed
independence, it was celebrated by those musicians, and it’s in the
Plaza Hotel, where they were lodged, that they composed
“Independence Cha Cha,” and that anthem mentions all the political
parties, in a way reflecting a unanimous solidarity. “Independence
Cha Cha” became very popular all across the continent of Africa as
an independence call for all the other countries. It became the name
for the Liberation Party in Rhodesia that subsequently became
Zimbabwe. It became a political anthem for the call for independence.

ZM

One of the striking revelations of this film is the role of the UN
Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. So far, what we hear about
Hammarskjöld, the main narrative, is about his efforts to preside
over the first UN peacekeeping forces in Egypt and Congo and about how
he was killed in a plane crash in 1961, and findings that this
happened with the support of the CIA.

In your film, we see Lumumba asking for help from the UN against the
Belgian occupation of Katanga. The Belgians plead with Hammarskjöld
not to intervene in Katanga, and he actually flies there to meet
Moïse Tshombe. In the film we hear that “the downfall of Lumumba
was inscribed in that event_.”_ You also reveal how Hammarskjöld
says to the US ambassador to the UN that “Lumumba must be broken.”
To what extent is Hammarskjöld and the UN responsible for Lumumba’s
assassination?

JG

It’s a crucial question. At the very end of the film, we have a
statement about his murder. We have a series of names: Kwame Nkrumah
overthrown in 1966, Malcolm X shot in Harlem 1965, Nikita Khrushchev,
the Soviet premier, overthrown in 1964 and written out of Soviet
history, and then we had Dag Hammarskjöld killed in mid-September
1961. We didn’t dig into why precisely, but I thought it was
important that all these people were subsequently victims of that
neocolonial grab towards the Global South. Of course, the only one who
survived was Andrée Blouin, who, after two more death threats, was
exiled from the Congo by way of Switzerland.

But to come back to the story of Dag Hammarskjöld. I had hoped in the
film to sketch more of an ambivalent character arc. He’s a person
who is suffering, and you can read it in his face. I really think he
had his back against the wall and was navigating all these forces. In
the General Assembly, the Global South community was pushing for a
United Nations force against the colonial powers. That’s also
interesting. Dag Hammarskjöld was siding with the Global South. You
know, the UN Congo Mission was the biggest mission ever, and if that
would fail—because in the film they all ask this question, “What
if the Congo Mission fails?”—and it did actually, because Lumumba
was killed. But he had his back against the wall. And the United
Kingdom and the United States were both threatening to withdraw their
funding.

An important source for the film was Ludo De Witte’s book _The
Assassination of Patrice Lumumba_, published in 1999. He was able to
gather a lot of evidence in United Nations cables and cables within
Belgium that pointed to the fact that, indeed, Dag Hammarskjold was
complicit and involved in the downfall of Lumumba, as was the Belgian
monarchy. In Belgium it was really shocking, because the book was
published 1999 and there was a parliamentary commission in 2004, which
had a half-baked conclusion saying, yes, the monarchy knew about the
murder. That is why the film ends with that statement on its own, the
singular statement that actually the Belgian government was complicit
in murder, because that’s still not been concluded in Belgium. They
are still arguing, “Should we say, ‘We have regret’? Or should
we say, ‘I am sorry’?” That is about reparation as well, because
if you say sorry, you actually admit that there was a crime and that
there should be consequences.

ZM

The archive is incredibly rich in the evocation of that time period of
the mid and late 1950s, for instance the Bandung Conference, where you
have all these figures from across the Third World standing up to
imperialism and demanding independence. Abdel Nasser, Nkrumah,
Sukarno, Krishna Menon, the Indian ambassador to the UN. Some of the
most memorable moments are Khrushchev’s visit to the US, but more so
his outspokenness against colonialism and bringing this resolution on
granting independence to colonized countries, in 1960.  What did you
want people to take away from uncovering this moment in history: Is
this archive a reminder of what could be possible? A taking of
inspiration from that, or is it more like what Thomas Kanza, Congo’s
ambassador to the UN, called “an independence rotten at the
roots,” a tragic ending to something that could have been?

JG

While researching that period I saw a whole sense of solidarity. At
the beginning, all the political parties in the Congo were unanimously
agreeing. But three months later, there was an economic roundtable
where Mobutu was being called in by Larry Devlin, and he was already
being groomed to become a CIA asset. This was pre-independence, so the
machinations were already there. If you look into that period in
history, there is unanimity and solidarity. Sukarno invites all the
leaders to the 1955 Bandung Conference. The Arab countries are there,
the Latin American countries are there, the African countries are
there. It was the biggest gathering of countries where they were
trying to come up with an alternative to the ideological divide
between East and West, and they called for decolonization.

It’s very much similar leaders that make it to the 15th General
Assembly, when Nikita Khrushchev in September 1960—and this is a
precedent as well—was calling for all the world leaders to join him
to talk about demilitarization and decolonization. When Khrushchev
arrives in 1959, he is the very first Soviet leader after the
Communist Revolution of 1917 who visits the United States and talks
about demilitarization, and then 10 days after visiting the United
States, he goes to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution in
Maoist China. He refuses Mao to have the nuclear bomb and recalls all
the nuclear scientists from China. In essence, you know, the United
States had an unlikely ally in Nikita Khrushchev. There’s a lot to
the history of Nikita Khrushchev, which is not to say he’s a saint.
There is a reference to Hungary when he arrives at the United Nations,
when they’re calling him a fat red rat. But he did set a precedent
in inviting all these nonaligned leaders to the 15th General Assembly,
including Fidel Castro, who gave his first marathon speech, which is
still the longest speech in human history. There was Jawaharlal Nehru,
Kwame Nkrumah, Sékou Touré, Abdel Nasser. The big absentee is
Patrice Lumumba, but there is a unanimity amongst these leaders in the
General Assembly, where they are siding with Patrice Lumumba,
including Castro. The Congo crisis is the big discussion in that 15th
General Assembly. There was a sense of hope with the influx of African
countries, the Global South becoming the majority at the United
Nations. But all of that was threatening for the West. So there was
that sense of hope and there was also a shift happening, and Belgium
was crucial in using Patrice Lumumba’s murder and assassination as
ground zero for how the West would deal with this sense of hope and
solidarity.

But I don’t want to be pessimistic. Today there are still things
moving. I just came back from Havana and the Patria colloquium with
500 journalists from Latin America. There are also huge shifts
happening in Africa with Niger and Mali, when they threw out the
French and the Americans, and there is a sense of trying to establish
sovereign countries from a Global South perspective, where they want
to take decision making into their own hands.

ZM

The struggle still continues in 2025. I want to talk about the style
of the film. Some of the images are very haunting. For instance, you
have a recurring image of an elephant; an elephant on a boat being
held by a white woman speeding across the water; an elephant being
lifted onto a crane, and then later dropped. Then you have other
references, like this clip from René Magritte and his painting T_he
Treachery of Images_, where it says, “This is not a pipe.” And
later, during the coup d’etat against Lumumba, Mobutu says, “This
is not a coup d’etat.” What were you trying to do with the choice
of images in the film, and images as allegory?

JG

Well, “this is not a pipe, this is not a coup” is so Belgian.
Belgium is full of schizophrenia. We have two languages, but we
don’t have a national language, and this whole thing of being a
subtitled country, for instance, you go to the supermarket, you buy a
bottle of milk, it’s always subtitled in two languages, and you feel
that sense of displacement. It’s so much part of how irony or jokes
can contain contradictions, and “this is not a pipe” is a typical
belgicism, where you suddenly get a subtitled version of something,
but it causes alienation. “This is not a coup” you can read
between the lines. You have Allen Dulles constantly saying something,
but for the most part, he’s denying something, but by
denying—“This is not what it is”—he is saying what it is.
It’s this irony of denial that exposes what’s really going on. The
very last time he’s in the film, he says, “We might have made a
mistake. We were actually exaggerating the communist threat.” He
finally says something that is more accurate. But this way of holding
contradictions is, for me, interesting, and maybe politics is also a
part of that. When they say “weapons of mass destruction” in more
contemporary times—it’s in denial that things are revealed, in
these contradictions. Truth is maybe closer to contradictions.

ZM

What about the elephant?

JG

This is the poetic third space, the cinematic space, that is opened
up. And if you research a body of archive, sometimes things offer
themselves. This elephant came back again and again. In Sékou
Touré’s Guinea, the elephant was a national symbol. The elephant in
the water is this underwaterness of certain things that are about to
emerge or the displacement of an elephant in the zoo or hanging in the
air. It’s all these things that can embody what the symbol stands
for. There is an acoustic biologist, Katy Payne, who studies elephant
behavior, and she was listening to the deep sounds that the feet of
elephants make, that you cannot actually hear with human ears, but you
can record them with infrasound or ultrasound. She says that every
hour or so, they all stand and stretch their ears and listen to where
they’re going to head next. It was such a peculiar image, but for me
it’s what sometimes history gives. Sometimes you listen, and it
takes you to places that you would never have thought it could take
you. It’s like what novelists say about their characters—you set
them up in a context, but the characters are pushed into making
certain choices, and then suddenly it is the characters that are
writing the book. It’s the characters who take you on a journey, and
for me, very often the film itself is a challenge, where it takes me
to places that I would never have thought I would venture. If you
listen to history, that’s what it gives and, for me, that is what
the elephant is.

ZM

A large part of the film explores Congo’s resources—uranium in the
building of the atomic bomb, but also coltan, tin, and so on. You have
images of Tesla vehicles, and Apple advertisements. The relationships
between the pillaging of minerals and the history of war and
intervention in the DRC is well known. Today Congo is still in crisis,
with Rwanda-backed M23 having taken Goma and large areas of the east.
To what extent do we need to go beyond looking at minerals and
resources, and consider other elements as part of the explanation for
Congo’s brutal history?

JG

To me the whole corporatocracy is the engine. Of course, it includes
the whole rift between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and that genocide
that crossed over to the Congo. A lot of the refugees made it to the
Congo and that has created a more complex situation. That is part of
it. But then the rift between the Hutus and the Tutsis dates back to
the Belgians, who also caused a rift as a divide-and-conquer strategy
to get at the riches and the conflict minerals. Ludo De Witte again
wrote an interesting book and gave an analysis of how the whole rift
between Tutsis and Hutus was artificial. It’s the same as what
happened in Katanga between the Balubas and then what was happening to
the south with President Tshombe and the subsequent genocide in
Katanga. The colonial military force also caused rifts between
identities—they would send  people from other parts of the country
when revolts were happening. They would not send the people from that
area; they would send rival groups. So in the army, identities and
cultures were set against one another, and that’s part of what’s
going on in eastern Congo. Indeed the Tesla and the iPhone images are
followed by the statistics of raped women. And if you look at the map
from the film_ City of Joy_, which is about the rape of women in
eastern Congo, there is a direct correlation between the rape women
and the mining sites. I think the occupation of eastern Congo would
not happen—and I say “occupation,” which is literally the same
as the occupation of Gaza or what’s going on now with the bombing of
Yemen, it’s also an occupation of rival groups against one another,
or Ethiopia or Sudan.

If eastern Congo did not have what they call a “geological scandal
of resources,” it would be left alone. The European Union recently
approved weapons again to Kagame, and there were troops embedded with
the M23, and it’s a private militia involved with other private
militia involved in the rape of women. I was with Zap Mama, who reads
the voice of Andrée Blouin in the film, and she was texting Denis
Mukwege, and she got a message back to say that it’s unclear what
will happen with Panzi Hospital, because M23 also occupied Bukavu,
where Panzi Hospital is located. So that is why the iPhone commercial
is in the film. It is literally a wake-up call: The lithium and the
coltan that is sourced for green energy or green technology goes back
to child labor and women being raped.

ZM

How is the film being received in Africa since its release, and are
there plans for it to be seen more widely on the continent?

JG

On April 9, it will be shown at the Andrée Blouin Center in Kinshasa,
and it’s been shown in some festivals in Kinshasa, where it was
pirated. There’s Maliyamungu Muhande
[[link removed]], a Congolese
filmmaker whose uncle was killed in eastern Congo just a month
ago—she wrote an article in T_he Nation _called “Soundtrack to a
Complicit Silence.” She took it to South Africa, and it has been
showing on the continent as well. It was released recently in Nairobi,
and it has a distributor in Kenya. There is a Moroccan distributor who
distributes on the continent. It was shown in El Gouna Festival in
Egypt, where we won the prize with the film. Vijay Prashad announced
the Andrée Blouin Prize for journalism. The whole story of Andrée
Blouin is being rewritten back into history. It had a way to find
redemption where the memoirs of Andrée Blouin have been published by
Eve Blouin and released a month and a half ago by Verso.

The film was just now shown at the Patria Colloquium in Havana, and it
was very well received. We had a meeting at the Film Institute in
Havana, and they don’t even have electricity, the generator is
broken. We went to the Casa de las Américas, but I couldn’t even go
to the toilet, because they don’t have water.  You see that
what’s going on in Cuba is, in a sense, still a result of this whole
Global South politics, but it had a huge echo there. What was a little
bit of a homecoming for me was the film was shown at the Maysles
Center in Harlem on 125th Street, one block from Hotel Theresa, and
that was organized by the Friends of the Congo.

But at the same time, you know the film was part of the Oscar
nominations. so it also reached a big audience. I invited Zap Mama and
Marie Daulne, and we wrote a statement for the extraction economy to
be held accountable for what’s going on in eastern Congo. On the
bottom of her shoes, she had written “Free Congo,” and once she
opened her dress, it also said “Free Congo,” so if we had won the
Oscar, we would have gone on stage as well, just as _No Other
Land_ made a very important political statement about what’s going
on in Gaza and the West Bank, Zap Mama would have made a call.

_Johan Grimonprez is a Belgian multimedia artist, filmmaker, and
curator._

_Zahra Moloo is a Kenyan-Canadian researcher, documentary filmmaker
and PhD candidate in Human Geography at the University of Toronto._

_Africa Is a Country offers a critical perspective on various social,
political, and cultural issues affecting Africa that push back on
continental legacies of colonialism and exploitation. Our editorial
viewpoint emphasizes the complexity and diversity of African
experiences, challenging stereotypes and simplistic narratives. Our
work highlights local voices and perspectives, focusing on
contemporary issues in politics, economics, and culture, as well as
the usable past. We often engage with broader global discourses while
remaining rooted in specific African contexts, advocating for nuanced
discussions that reflect the realities of life in Africa._

* Patrice Lumumba
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* Congo
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* Belgium
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* colonialism
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* imperialism
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* United States
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* United Nations
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