Lumumba's Assassination & the US's "Jazz Ambassadors" w/ Gerald Horne & Anthony Ballas (AR&D Ep. 14)

Speaker 1: You remember Din-Din-Boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rifle. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on them.

Henry Hakimaki: Hello and welcome to Guerrilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Hakimaki, joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussain, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing okay, Henry. It's good to see you. Nice to see you as well. We have two returning guests today, but before we introduce them and the topic at hand, I want to remind the listeners that they can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A history. You'll never hear advertisements or anything like that on the show, so your support is the only thing that keeps us up and running. A brief note that this is going to be a continuation of our African Revolutions and Decolonization series and is going to be related to the Congo for much of the conversation. And we would like to remind you as well, listeners, that within our African Revolutions and Decolonization series, we have several episodes on the Congo that you should listen to. We have two episodes with Professor Georges Nzangola Ntelaja on the history of Congo, both before colonization as well as up through the Mobutu period and to today, actually. And we also have a subsequent supplemental episode, a pretty extensive one. It's about almost three hours long that's on the mining industry of the Congo, both in terms of industrial mining and in terms of artisanal mining, environmental impacts, societal impacts, the history of that industry. So if those are things that are of interest to you, be sure to check that out on our feed. And they all may be useful for understanding this conversation. Turning to our guests now, as I mentioned, we have two returning guests. First, we have Professor Gerald Horne. Professor Gerald Horne is John Jay and Rebecca Moore's Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. He's the author of dozens of books and has been on our show probably four or five times, at least by this point. So you can definitely check out his previous episodes on the show. Professor Horne, it's a pleasure to have you back. How are you doing today? Oh, fine. And thank you for inviting me. Absolutely. It's always a pleasure and an honor to have you on the show. We're also rejoined by Anthony Balas, who is an organizer and a PhD student in literature at Duke University. Tony, it's nice to have you back on. I know that I interviewed you just last week, and it'll only be about two weeks between the episodes released for listeners. How are you doing today?

Anthony Ballas: I'm doing well, Henry. Thank you, and thanks for having me on again.

Henry Hakimaki: Absolutely. Just to remind the listeners briefly, if you didn't catch Tony's previous appearance on the show, he was talking about an article that he co-wrote with Dr. Horn called Shadowboxing with Ghosts, which talks about whiteness, racial relations, boxing, and the crisis of imperialism in the current day. Again, that episode will be out just a couple of weeks before this one. So if you want to check that out, you can definitely go back into our feed and it should be pretty easy to find. The topic for today, on the other hand, is a very interesting one. We're going to be focusing on the documentary soundtrack to a coup d'etat and also the jazz ambassador program to the Congo. So this first question is, of course, the question that people who haven't seen the documentary or know of the jazz ambassadors. I know, Tony, we mentioned them in passing a few times in the previous episode with you. Everybody that hasn't seen the film is going to be wondering what is this documentary about and what are these jazz ambassadors that we're going to be talking about in this episode? So I don't know if Professor Horne, you want to perhaps give an introduction to the jazz ambassadors and then also what the scope of this documentary is, because the scope is actually rather large. It's not just the jazz ambassadors. It looks at racial relations within the United States, the assassination of Lumumba, et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot that's covered.

Gerald Horne: Well, I'll begin, but my comrade can add notes that I neglect. So this is a documentary, as you suggest, about what amounts to a Cold War initiative by the United States of America. That is to say, sending particularly Black American musicians around the world, not least to Africa. And I've written about that in my book, Jazz and Justice. You've had other historians who have written about this program specifically, because there are numerous records about this program. Those who are fans of the music might recall that Duke Ellington, one of his signature tunes, Isfahan, comes from that particular program, that is to say, touring persia touring iran although if i'm not mistaken billy strayhorn his colleague actually wrote that tune but i may be mistaken but in any case this film

Anthony Ballas: focuses quite a bit on Louis Armstrong of New Orleans.

Gerald Horne: The New Orleans airport is named after him. That gives you an idea of the significance for both that city and for the country. There are not that many airports in the United States named after Black Americans, I assure you. And He comes to that part of Africa against the backdrop of turmoil. Recall that Congo was seized to a degree by the monarch in Belgium, tiny Belgium, in the late 19th century. And it's fair to suggest that many nations could compete for the ignominious title of being the most ravaged and exploited cruelly. But Congo could be a contender for that dubious crown because Congo happened to be a site of savage labor exploitation, particularly with the production of rubber. But to this very day, the production of numerous natural resources and minerals that are essential for the economies of the capitalist world. If I'm not mistaken, a part of the materiel that went into the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in August 1945 emerged from the Congo, for example. So when Louis Armstrong arrives there, he's arriving at a point when Congo is in turmoil, surging to independence under the leadership of Patrice Lumumba. This documentary deals with that backdrop, deals with the musicians, and then culminates in a quite rousing fashion with Black Americans invading the United Nations in Manhattan, New York City, USA, as the issue of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the founding father, so to speak, of modern Congo. This assassination is being debated, and many Black Americans are quite upset about the role of U.S. imperialism. In fact, a CIA station chief by the name of Devlin, D-E-V-L-I-N, not devil, actually publishes a memoir claiming discredit for his and his agency's role in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. So these Black Americans had something to be upset about. But as I pointed out in another book, Interestingly enough, this rather vigorous and progressive manifestation of anger and anti-colonial furor was marred by the fact that the demonstrators barred from their ranks. Ben Davis Jr., who was a black leader of the U.S. Communist Party, elected to The City Council of New York, 1943, reelected in 1945, ousted ignominiously in 1949, put in jail on dubious grounds of 1950, 1951. A close comrade of Paul Robeson, who I'm sure your audience is familiar with. So in sum and substance, that's a broad rendition of what this documentary deals with. And I don't know if Anthony has anything to add.

Anthony Ballas: I just add a couple things regarding the context in which Armstrong was deployed on tour in Western and Central Africa during 1960 and 61, I believe. Actually, no, it was 19, yeah, 1960 and 61, yes. Originally, he had refused to be part of the Jazz Ambassadors program after the governor of Arkansas deployed the National Guard to prevent African-American students from entering Little Rock High School. He saw, I think he's even on record saying that President Eisenhower is two-faced and And can go to hell, I even believe he said. And so he was deployed as part of the Jazz Ambassador program three or so years later. And his trip into the Katanga region of the Congo is actually a kind of a detour because the trip was sponsored by the U.S. State Department and Pepsi-Cola. And if I'm remembering correctly, this is not in the documentaries very explicitly, and we'll probably get into why that is the case, because this film is stylistically very interesting and not sort of composed in a traditional documentary fashion. But this leg of his tour into the Katanga region was unplanned, and it was sort of a last minute detour. that was not sponsored by Pepsi-Cola. And in fact, if I'm not mistaken, Larry Devlin himself was sort of... Armstrong's chauffeur in this region while he was playing in Elizabethville. And that was no accident, you see, because this concert that he gives in Katanga to tens of thousands of fans was very likely used as cover for the planning and the plot to assassinate Lumumba in the joint efforts by the Belgian intelligence and the CIA. And so that sort of just fills out the context a little more in terms of how he made it to the Katanga region in the first place. Of course, the Katanga region wasn't even at this time acknowledged by the United States as a legitimate capital elizabethville uh being the capital of that region and so it's it's all rather odd but when you start to put the pieces together which this documentary has done in which authors like susan willis has done in her book white white terrors if i'm getting the is that correct white malice white malice white malice thank you um then then the really the story starts to emerge and uh that well, the story that's told in this documentary, which is the Lumumba was assassinated via these efforts and that the jazz ambassadors sort of served as a cover in 1961.

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, well, we'll probably want to get more into those details, but I wanted to go back in terms of context and covering some of the material that's in the PBS documentary about the jazz ambassadors. One point, you know, especially Professor Horn, you talked extensively about Paul Robeson, and I wondered if there was some way in which the idea to enlist, you know, jazz musicians and others as at least somewhat patriotic Americans, if they could count on that. Oh, well, I don't know what that would mean. I mean, you know, this is such a, you know, fascinating contradiction to try and use them in this way. But if there was some kind of conscious attempt to, you know, be a counterpoint to somebody like Paul Robeson, who, you know, was probably one of the most famous, you know, Americans, certainly also African Americans globally. in a previous generation who was an outspoken communist and, you know, certainly played a different role in the kind of cultural politics of the Cold War. How much of that was, like, relevant and how conscious might have the, you know, the jazz musicians been been about this, especially since, you know, we keep getting told that, you know, Louis Armstrong didn't know, you know, about this assassination plot and so on. But they also did know something about what America hoped to gain, which is about, you know, by sending them abroad and what kind of cultural propaganda we might say more than cultural diplomacy. So I just had a question about that, and also maybe if both of you could talk a little bit more about the relationship contextually between racism, struggle, whether it took the form of racism, and so on for Black liberation, Black freedom movement, and decolonization on the African continent, especially during the Cold War.

Gerald Horne: Well, obviously you've hit the nail on the head with regard to the import of your question. Not only during the Cold War, but going back centuries, there had been a fundamental contradiction between the presence of Black people on the shores of North America and the presence of the settler class. irrespective of socioeconomic background. That is to say, the latter oftentimes arrived on these shores because they were fleeing either persecution in Europe or in other parts of the globe and thought that they could attain a certain kind of liberty in this country. Whereas the Black population was dragged involuntarily and unwillingly across the Atlantic and oftentimes felt the need in order to escape the manacles of slavery for which they were brought across the Atlantic, they felt the need to conspire with the real and imagined antagonists. of the settler class, which creates this fundamental contradiction and helps to shed light, even to this very day, on how and why it is that there's disproportionate police slayings of Black people disproportionately with regard to infant mortality rates, much higher rates, and the list is long and legion. And these contradictions sharpened during the Cold War, sharpened during the post-1945 period when U.S. imperialism was accepting the baton from a flagging British empire with regard to leadership of the capitalist world and imperialist world. and were attempting to paint the socialist camp as being avatars of exploitation and birth of freedom. But that was a difficult portrait to paint as long as there were lynchings of Black Americans, for example, and this litany of horrors too gruesome to recite to a degree. And Paul Robeson emerged as the leading international figure because he had been in exile in London. He was multilingual. Of course, he spoke Russian, which did not necessarily win him plaudits. in Washington and on Wall Street. He, along with the Black communist lawyer William Patterson, filed a petition at the United Nations, 1950-1951, charging the United States with genocide against Black people, which brought a hellstorm of invective down on his head. And that's the backdrop for the jazz ambassadors. Now, to be sure, there were Black musical figures who were sympathetic to Robson. I think of Dizzy Gillespie, for example. And it's also true that there was this propaganda around the music as well. That is to say, you still hear this today from certain leading figures whose names I will not mention. who portray the music as a sort of symbol of the United States, because supposedly it embodies freedom, which supposedly means it's a symbol of the United States of America. And therefore, It was double-edged when you sent Black American musicians to these various lands because their presence was supposedly going to be interpreted as being a repudiation of this idea that Black Americans were being deprived of freedom because here you have these men, mostly men, ebony-hued, dressed meticulously, playing wonderfully, in the sense, the implication being that one does not attain such skill and sophistication on these instruments unless you're coming from a society where you're not persecuted, for example. And at the same time, they're playing this music that's supposedly embodying freedom. And so the jazz ambassadors were seen as a major propaganda blow during the Cold War. And I think it's fair to say that many of the musicians were seen as witting to a certain degree with regard to what role they were playing. But keep in mind as well that it's not as if many of these musicians were well compensated. to put it in the jargon of the day, they needed the gigs, basically. And so I should also add the further point, which ties into the latter point, which is that historically, ever since this music emerged at the end of the 19th century, with New Orleans given a principal role in that regard, these musicians had been playing overseas. at a certain point, and this might still be the case, Tokyo had more jazz clubs than New York City, for example. And many flocked to Paris, for example, which developed a music scene early on. So many of these musicians were keen and prone to travel overseas to apply their trade. And that's another factor feeding into the jazz ambassadors.

Henry Hakimaki: I can only feel free, feel free to add in whatever you want, Tony.

Anthony Ballas: Sure. I mean, this point about this, this certainly is a sort of contradiction. And if the film explores this contradiction in an interesting way, which we can probably get into, but I, For instance, characters like Duke Ellington, who doesn't play a prominent role in this film, but is depicted somewhat, if I remember correctly, he would often travel abroad. He was a jazz ambassador for a time also, by the way, I think in the late 50s into the 60s, when he traveled to Moscow and was met by crowds that would rival Beatlemania, as one historian put it. But even previous to that, he had to travel abroad in the 1930s to obtain revenue, as Dr. Horn is speaking to, because of the makeup of the ownership of the rights to his compositions. He had a very manipulative manager, as many musicians did, many artists did, many Black American artists did in particular, I would say, named Irving Mills, who, without any talent, would pen his name on Ellington's compositions and receive ownership rights. So someone like Ellington was facing drawing revenue streams, and he was reliant on the international arena for those venues to obtain his livelihood, and he was not alone in that regard. At the same time, so that provides a sort of, you know, not an excuse, but it was a very real political economic reason why these musicians had to travel abroad as part of these State Department tours. They also wanted their music to be heard, and so they would broadcast their music and give interviews and things of that nature via the Voice of America radio station, which is also explored in this film. And as Dr. Horne also mentioned, the the practice of jazz musicians traveling abroad is very early in the history of jazz and you can you can see a record of this in um James Weldon Johnson's Black Manhattan what's it what's the book called Manhattan um Black Manhattan I think uh where he has an account of James Reese Europe's Hellfighters coming back into Harlem and being treated atrociously. This is a scene that is also depicted in fictional form in Toni Morrison's novel Jazz. And so this is a very long legacy with regard to the music. And so the Jazz Ambassadors is almost a State Department initiative to seize upon something that was already existent, the global circulation of this music and these musicians.

Henry Hakimaki: And just for listeners who are not familiar with Duke Ellington in particular, since you raised this, Tony. Duke Ellington was having to travel around the world in order to finance himself. This is somebody who has written numerous jazz standards that are still frequently covered to today and is popularly credited with well over 1,000 compositions. Now, we did mention, I know Dr. Horn mentioned that he had co-writers and contributors that would actually write fair amounts of the music that is credited to him. managers that would pen their names onto his works as well. But it's generally considered that he had well over 1,000 works that he actually authored over the course of his life. And despite the fact that he had over 1,000 unique works that he penned over his life and the fact that many of them were popular not only in his time but continue to be popular to today, he was still having to slum it in many ways as jazz musicians tend to do. So that's kind of what the situation was like at the time. I did want to just mention a couple of points that were brought up by the two of you before advancing us a little bit. It's really interesting, this discussion of the free form of jazz, this idea that the improvisational quality, the free character of jazz makes it in many ways uniquely suited to or uniquely vulnerable to the appropriation that was being undertaken in this program. And it reminds me of Francis Stoner Saunders' Cultural Cold War, which looks at the CIA's funding of abstract expressionism in literary magazines as well. This idea that the freedom that could be portrayed in these various cultural forms was something that was indicative of the United States, but the CIA had their own purposes for funding and supporting those sorts of works. Jazz in some ways works much the same way and was utilized by the CIA in their own efforts as well. So that's an interesting connection that I think that can be made. I also think that we can make a connection with the discussion that we had with Tony in that previous episode that I mentioned. about boxing and jazz. So boxing is a site where, as we discussed, racial and imperial anxieties play out. This is something that the two of you discussed in your Shadowboxing with Ghosts article. This film also offers the other cultural arena of jazz where these similar dynamics unfold, where we can look at, again, imperial dynamic and racial dynamics. So I'm wondering if you would like to take... For a moment, because we did talk last episode about the boxing component about it. But can you talk about how these two forms, boxing and jazz, while being on the surface level, looking extremely different, function similarly as stages for what you called the localizing geopolitical intrigue?

Gerald Horne: Well, first of all, as you probably know, you have jazz musicians like Miles Davis, the trumpeter, bandleader, who styled himself as a kind of boxer, for example. Eugene Bullard, who was an aviator, boxer. and musician, although he didn't turn to music until he arrived in Paris post-1919 and noticed the popularity of the music and decided to take up the drums, for example. Just as a footnote, he wound up in 1949, August, September, with Paul Robeson in Peekskill, New York, when Robeson was assaulted by bigots as he was seeking to do a fundraising concert for an organization called the Civil Rights Congress. So there is this kind of compatibility there. between the music and the sweet science. And I should mention another footnote, which is that you mentioned Duke Ellington. And although this may be hard to believe, in the early 1970s, when I was much younger and much more footloose and fancy free, I led a music combo that played in Leningrad, or the city now known as St. Petersburg. and the venue I performed at, the Ellington had performed at earlier. Not that there is any parallel musically. That's just a historic coincidence to put it bluntly. But I think also to return to the thread that boxing and the music, These are venues, rare venues, where Black American men were routinely persecuted, not to mention problematized, or able to make a decent living, for example. In other words, compared to other avenues, there were less barriers to entry, for example. say, if you want to become an architect or an attorney or even a manager of a baseball team, for example. And so I think that it helps to attract a number of Black American men. And then, of course, you have the president of Jack Johnson, the heavyweight boxing champion more than 115 years ago, born in Galveston, Texas, by the way, who fought all over the world. In fact, one of his most famous bouts took place in Australia, by the way, and also resided in exile in Mexico. If I'm not mistaken, he said Barcelona was his favorite city where he also lived. He was in pre-1917 Russia, for example. And so he was a well-known figure, and well-known figures tend to attract imitators or those who would like to walk in their footsteps, for example. Hence, the proliferation at one time of Black American boxers, a number of whom, of which has been declining steadily for various reasons.

Anthony Ballas: Just one point I'll make, I guess, is that I don't really know about the connections between jazz and boxing historically, but just sort of the presentation of the performance of these crafts have some interesting similarities. The body is the site for the action in boxing, obviously, and the jazz is a very embodied medium, the embodied genre of music. It's very focused on the body of the performer. who is gyrating and moving around the stage and is not sort of in a static orchestral setting sat upon chairs, right? So there's something sort of kinetic about the form of jazz as it's performed. And so there might be something interesting to think about just with regard to the formal characteristics of both of these things.

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, those are nice observations. But I think, you know, I wanted to now turn maybe more directly to the subject of the film. So we have Louis Armstrong going to the Congo, and we've heard a little bit about, you know, the history of the Congo here under Belgian colonial control, and particularly the king's, you know, almost absolute ownership of it and the devastation that he wrought and exploiting it and its significance as a place for uranium and many other important minerals. But we haven't talked that much about Lumumba and the decolonization what he signified. I mean, he was kind of a global historical figure as this first elected post-colonial African leader. And then maybe we can talk a little bit more about his actual assassination and the place of the jazz performance in it. But like to tell us a little bit about Lumumba and the decolonization that led to him being recognized as some kind of a threat to U.S. interests in the Cold War.

Gerald Horne: Well, first of all, one has to recognize the hysteria of the Cold War. As a matter of fact, we got a glimpse of that ironically just a few days ago when U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke in Munich to the Munich Security Conference, and he basically extended an invitation to his European hosts to join U.S. imperialism hand in hand in reversing the anti-colonial tide of the post-1945 era, which admittedly, at least I would admit, that if that were to take place, it would have monumental consequences on this side of the Atlantic since the retreat of US apartheid, US Jim Crow was inextricably connected to the anti-colonial upsurge post-1945, which of course brings us to Lumumba, one of the few literate Africans in a country which by some measures is larger than Western Europe, but had been systematically denied education of various sorts. And once again, for those looking for a literary companion piece to the documentary soundtrack of the coup d'etat, I would recommend the memoir by Andre Bluin, B-L-O-U-I-N, My Country, Africa, Autobiography of the Black Passionaria, who was on the scene in Congo at that particular moment, although her place of birth, if I'm not mistaken, was Central African Republic. to an extent, east of what is now the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And then she came to maturity across the Congo River in what is now called the Republic of the Congo, Congo Brazzaville, in other words, which, by the way, during the Cold War, became a pit stop for the Black Panther Party. as the country was then known as the People's Republic of the Congo, and like many African nations, was trying to pursue a non-capitalist path of development that ran aground once the socialist camp began to retreat. But I should also mention that Patrice Lumumba, his name lives on. Because even to this very day, the Soviet era Patrice Lumomen University, which was designed during the Cold War to educate and train many of these Africans, such as many Condoleezza, who had been systematically deprived of education, it was established then. And in fact, in some ways, this has ramifications in this country, speaking of the United States, because Barack Obama Sr. was attracted to the University of Hawaii to matriculate as a part of a concerted effort to help to contest Patrice Lumumba University and other universities, for example, in the then German Democratic Republic or East Germany, for example, because before these Soviet-era universities began to attract African students, they were treated like Black American students, for example. In other words, scholarships were not necessarily offered to them routinely. And so this opened up a new venue. But alas, as we know, and as the documentary details suggest, There was a lot of skullduggery that was emerging during this time in Africa because, in no small measure, the fear that Africa's vast resources would be deprived of the imperialist war machine. This kind of skullduggery reaches a kind of deafening crescendo post-1957 when Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah surges to independence and then Nkrumah and the Convention People's Party begin to organize conferences in Accra, Ghana, attracting anti-colonial leaders from all over the continent, for example. And you may know that Nkrumah subsequently writes one of the more intriguing books about the Congo during that time and what befell Lumumba. That's another literary companion piece you can add to your bibliography. So I'll stop there and turn the microphone back over to Anthony.

Anthony Ballas: I'm not sure I have much to add in terms of the history, just because that's not really my specialty. But... It may be important to talk about the context in the 1950s and the Cold War. I mean, your listeners are probably very familiar with this sort of context of the Cold War in a certain sense. But you had the Bandung Conference, for instance. and the non-aligned states. In 1955, 56, you had the Suez Crisis. You had these deepening contradictions regarding the locus of power globally and who was going to remain at the seat of power. And so that is explored in this film, certainly. I might have to have Dr. Horn take us into the actual assassination.

Henry Hakimaki: Well, before we get to the assassination, I just wanted to make one very small point, and then I was going to ask about the assassination anyway, about Patrice Lumumba and how his name still lives on. I'm sure the listeners know that I live in Russia. I mention it almost every episode, I think. But very interestingly, with Patrice Lumumba, People's Friendship University... This is a university that's in Russia and it was intended for people from the global south, particularly from Africa, to come up to originally the Soviet Union and then Russian Federation and do their university studies here. An interesting point. It was originally named Patrice Lumumba People's Friendship University when it was founded during the Soviet period. That name was changed in 1992. The Patrice Lumumba part of the name was dropped and it just became People's Friendship University. And that went from 1992 up until... early 2023 when the government decided that they were going to re-add Patrice Lumumba's name back to the university. So again, it is now officially Patrice Lumumba People's Friendship University for the last just about three years, I would say. But there are Patrice Lumumba streets all over the place. I used to live right on one. I mean, like, you know, I was at the intersection of Patrice Lumumba Street and then another street in the old city that I used to live in. But yeah, Patrice Lumumba's name is everywhere. But I did want to turn us to the assassination. We've talked about jazz and we've talked about the jazz ambassadors, but we've only hinted so far in this conversation at the fact that the jazz ambassador program really was in many ways cover for the assassination that was taken against Lumumba. Now, We've talked a little bit about Lumumba. We have also, as I mentioned earlier, an episode with Georges Nzingola and Talaja that's focused on the history of the Congo. And we talk about Lumumba quite a bit in there. But we didn't talk about the jazz ambassadors and how they relate to the assassination. So I'm going to take this opportunity to now turn it over to you to discuss Lumumba. Again, remind the listeners briefly how that assassination unfolded, you know, the capturing of Lumumba, the transporting and the assassination of Lumumba, but then how did the Jazz Ambassador program fit into that story? What is the part that we haven't yet discussed in our show's history yet?

Anthony Ballas: I'll just say a couple of quick things because it came to mind. Larry Devlin attributes the call to assassinate the movement coming directly from Eisenhower. He suggests this by saying something like, Maybe he'll get eaten by crocodiles or something like that. That's the way that Devlin suggestively attributes the call to assassinate him or to kidnap him and then assassinate him. And the way that the jazz ambassadors, we've already covered it in a way, it's interesting to note that Louis Armstrong playing this concert, it wasn't just to, you know, it wasn't just, the jazz ambassadors weren't just to lubricate and massage the consciousness of populations abroad to launder the image of U.S. racism and U.S. apartheid. This was actually to provide material cover for the plotting and planning of this assassination. And that's, I think, a distinction that should be made between The uses of art and music and so forth ideologically and the uses of art and the context of a performance to provide material cover. I think there's two different things almost. They're connected, obviously, but I think it's a distinction that should be made. And the United States and Belgium during this time were materially connected. and financially backing Joseph Mobutu in the Katanga region, and fawning Mobutu as the legitimate leader of the Congo. I'll turn it over to Dr. Horn to provide some more details.

Gerald Horne: And of course, Mobutu, or Mobutu Sese Soko, as he was subsequently known, a kleptocrat, if there ever was one, seized power ultimately in the wake of the Moomba's assassination and ruled for decades, a frequent visitor to the White House during that time. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the retreat of the socialist camp, He was not needed as much by Washington and the imperialist powers, and that created objective conditions for his toppling. And he eventually had to flee the country, if I'm not mistaken, winds up in North Africa, where he passes away. The audience should also recognize the wider context, which is that At the time of Lumumba's assassination in January 1961, this is at a moment when Eisenhower is leaving power, JFK, President Kennedy is coming into power. And by the way, you can find, for those who are so inclined, documentation of the nefarious role of the U.S. authorities in the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, or in the JFK Presidential Library in Boston, Massachusetts. I would imagine that there have been frequent requests for such documentation, so you don't necessarily have to visit either place, particularly the out-of-the-way Abilene, Kansas, in order to receive that documentation. As a matter of fact, it wouldn't even surprise me if the documentation was on their websites, for example. But also in terms of the wider context... This is a time when you have these so-called minority regimes in what is now Zimbabwe, what was then Rhodesia or Southern Rhodesia, apartheid South Africa. They were collaborating with US imperialism at the time. In fact, some of you might recall a companion event, which is the death of United Nations official Dag Hammarskjöld. And a suspicious plane crash, and of course, there's so many suspicious plane crashes during the Cold War, they're sort of hard to keep track of, by the way. And it's subsequently been suggested that Rhodesians had a role in Dag Hammarskjöld's untimely death. And I'm sure that subsequent digging and excavation will probably unveil a more dedicated role of the Rhodesians and the apartheid South Africans in the tumultuous events in the Congo, particularly since we know that today, in 2026, playing a preeminent role in the Congolese economy, or a number of Israeli nationals, by the way, particularly in terms of the mining interest. I think the leading figure in that regard, I think his name is Benny Steinmetz, if I'm not mistaken. But there's been quite a bit of reportage about his own nefarious role. So I would say that this documentary it's well done in terms of digging up the footage, which is always the bugaboo for a documentary filmmaker. You just can't tell the story through talking heads. You need oftentimes footage. And the filmmakers, they do a fair job of excavating footage. In particular, you might even be able to find the precursor to the Illumina assassination on YouTube, because I've seen it in so many documentary films. That is to say, he's in a truck. being beaten by these manhandlers, for example. It seems like they're trying to stuff some sort of wad of cloth into his mouth so his screams will not be heard, for example. That particular stunning footage is in soundtrack to coup d'etat. But as I said, I've seen it in other documentaries which suggest to me that it can be easily found.

Adnan Hussain: Do you have any kind of concluding thoughts about how to pick up on that point that the research was clearly good? in terms of finding some vivid and meaningful archive film to be able to stitch this together with good visual materials. I'm wondering, you know, Tony, the sort of classic uh well one of you mentioned that it wasn't sort of just a classic documentary in its form and structure and so i'm wondering how you think it did in you know its innovative perhaps stylistic dimensions in you know making to what bringing to light connections and the issues and if either of you have any kind of comments about how well it's done that and what maybe, you know, is left out, if you think something is left out, but, you know, some kind of assessment of the film in recommending, you know, that people... It's been hailed and acclaimed, you know, but maybe as historians and people who've studied this, you know, what you would say about the success of the film, you know, in bringing together these histories for the audience.

Anthony Ballas: I would say it was tremendously successful aesthetically and therefore politically, as we argue in that piece. That's why it's the antidote to soft power, because what the film does is sort of disrupt the normative continuity editing that you find in Hollywood cinema by implementing a form of montage which was a form of cinema that was really experimented with and theorized and practiced by the Soviets like Sergei Eisenstein and others. And for that reason alone, this film is sort of a political piece of cinema. It would be regardless of the subject matter by using montage to this effect. But with montage and the subject matter, it becomes tremendously potent politically, I think. And the idea of montage really disrupts continuity, as I already mentioned, verisimilitude in terms of realism. by adding a certain dimension. And you talk about the interconnection between history or transcontinental history or even temporal histories between the past and the present, as Dr. Hornish is speaking to also. The film does that as well. The film stitches together archival footage, concert performances, FOIA-requested materials from the U.S. government, archival documents, there's citations on the screen as you're watching it, talking head interviews. There's all manner, newsreel footage, there's all manner of archival materials. There's sort of a montage effect between all those types of materials and the context in which the assassination of Lumumba was underway. It was being plotted and then implanted put into practice. And I view this film as an antidote, again, to use the title of the piece, because it is disturbing the way we typically tell those stories, the way Hollywood typically tells them, and also the way that we mythologize in the United States our own history. Doing the very thing that the State Department was doing by deploying the jazz ambassadors abroad to try to seamlessly produce or launder the white supremacist origins of this country and the treatment of African Americans in the 20th century. It's disrupting all those things. And it's a commentary on jazz as well, being a form of social critique. Jazz has numerous origins, as Dr. Horn describes in his book on jazz. But one of those is military marches and syncopated rhythms being innovated by Black musicians coming home from war sometimes. And so there's a form of social critique embedded in the music. You see that with Abby Lincoln's performances in this documentary, with Max Roach probably in particular. And so the film does a tremendous job of bringing all those elements together and re-narrativizing the history that is oftentimes concealed behind sort of aesthetic, normative aesthetics that we rely on in the United States.

Gerald Horne: And just one more footnote. that There was also this sort of militant upsurge on these shores amongst the musicians. And mentioning Abby Lincoln, Amanata Maseka, also reminds me of her then partner, Max Roach, the drummer, whose music exemplified this progressive, radical, militant upsurge. And for the writers in the audience, you should know that at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., There's a Max Roach archive that includes an uncompleted biography slash autobiography, I might say, in conjunction with the late writer Amiri Baraka, Leroy Jones. And it wouldn't take that much to sort of complete that story. and slap your name on the cover, for example. And I don't say that cynically. I say that also because it's a very intriguing story about a Max Roach, who, by the way, has roots not only in the Caribbean, but in the great dismal swamp area of the Virginia-North Carolina border, which was a maroon city, or node, I should say, during the times of slavery for decades, if not longer. A number of books have been written about that. But my call is coming in, so I'm going to have to duck out, if you don't mind. Yeah.

Henry Hakimaki: Unfortunately, we're out of time for today. Professor Horne is a man very much in demand, but I think that this conversation was wrapped up very well with that last discussion between Tony and Professor Horne on the form of the documentary. And of course, we at Guerrilla History are going to recommend that you can check out soundtrack to a coup d'etat hopefully it'll be easier for you to find it than it was for me in russia it was not easy to get my hands on it i guess i'll tell this funny story just very briefly since we're not holding professor horn anymore he has already gone i was only able to find it with Spanish subtitles the English subtitles were not available now that might not sound like a big thing for the listeners who haven't watched it yet but the film is in about four or five different languages over the course of it and so if you don't have the subtitles available to you you are relying on knowing the languages that are being used and so When the people were speaking in English, I understood everything. When we had Khrushchev and other characters speaking in Russian, I understood a fair amount of what was going on. But then when it was French or Portuguese, I was relying on my high school Spanish to try to read the subtitles and try to get out what I could from that. But eventually I was able to find the English language subtitle file online and I just was able to read... the text and try to fit with what I had seen and kind of tried to piece together with the subtitles later. So a little bit of a strange process. Listeners, hopefully you'll have an easier time finding it with subtitles that you understand fully. But yeah, check it out. Soundtrack to Akuteta. Tony, it was great having you on the show again. can you remind the listeners how they can find you and also remind your listeners of the other podcasts that you have? I mentioned on the last episode that DeFacto has my favorite interviews of Dr. Horn. So, you know, listeners do check out DeFacto podcast, but that's not the only podcast you have. So Tony, tell us about your work and your other two podcasts and where listeners can find you.

Anthony Ballas: Thank you, Henry. I host the De Facto podcast, and for listeners who frequent that podcast, I apologize for being on a bit of a hiatus because my PhD coursework is really getting in the way of things, I should say. And I'll be returning to that podcast format very soon with some interviews. one of which will be with Dr. Horn on his new book on the Hawaii coup from 1893. So look forward to that in the coming weeks. And then the other podcast is one I have with my good comrades, Jason Christian and Paul Klein. It's called Cold War Cinema, where we look at the, well, cinema of the Cold War era. And we actually, we talked about a soundtrack to a coup d'etat, but not directly. We've alluded to it, I should say, several times. You can find some things I've written in Scallywag magazine, such as this piece, Antidote to Soft Power, on soundtrack to a coup d'etat. You can find a joint piece with Dr. Horn that was covered in a previous episode of this podcast at the Black Agenda Report. called Shadowboxing with Ghosts, Jake Paul Whiteness and the Crisis of U.S. Imperialism, I believe it's called. And I have some work in Caribbean Quarterly. I have some work coming out in the Journal of 19th Century Americanists, a few other places.

Henry Hakimaki: Very exciting things. And I can assure you, Tony, it will not be your last invitation onto this show. Adnan, of course. Adnan, can you remind the listeners how they can find your other show and keep up to date with what you're doing?

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, well, you can follow me on X Adnan A. Hussain and probably come across me posting about upcoming episodes on the Adnan Hussain show. It's a YouTube and podcast format. So it's just at youtube.com slash at Adnan. There's a lot of the kinds of things we do on Guerrilla History, a lot of history there, but also a lot of contemporary politics. And, you know, by the time this comes out, I'm afraid we might still be in the midst of a terrible imperialist crusading war in West Asia focused on Iran. And I've been doing a lot of streams there. So go check it out if you want a place to discuss and talk with experts who I bring on to discuss what's going on.

Anthony Ballas: I'm a big fan of your guys' work. You do such important and great work. Your work has been invaluable to my education, both of you. So thank you very much.

Henry Hakimaki: Yeah, it's our pleasure, Tony. So as for me, listeners, I'm very much not online these months, or I guess it's probably about a year since I've really been online. But you can follow me at Huck1995, H-U-C-K-1-9-9-5 on Twitter. As for Guerrilla History, you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. And again, that's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A history. So on that note then, listeners, and until next time, solidarity.