Johan Grimonprez’s fascinating documentary suggests that the US used jazz legend Louis Armstrong in a ‘cool war’ offensive to assassinate Patrice Lumumba

I last encountered the work of the Belgian artist and film-maker Johan Grimonprez in the documentary-reverie Double Take from 2009, which imagined an encounter between two Alfred Hitchcocks. Now in this fascinating and valuably informative film, he amplifies what he sees as the mood music that lay behind the assassination of the leftist Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961; a strange and jazzy new “cool war” offensive in which the American intelligence services, through various fronts, tried to export jazz music by black American musicians to Africa, to win hearts and minds.

The film suggests that Lumumba’s murder, perpetrated by partisans of a civil war stoked by western intelligence services soon after his election, was connived by the US, the UN and by Congo’s former imperial masters, Belgium. The reasoning was that Lumumba might withhold from the west his country’s uranium reserves, vital for making nuclear weapons. Lumumba’s Congo was also a key player in the “United States of Africa” movement which was beginning to alarm the Eisenhower government.