Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

During the Cold war, post-colonial Congo was of strategic importance to the rival global super powers as its mines provided the uranium required to create nuclear weapons. During the early 1960s, Afro-American jazz greats such as Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone and Duke Ellington were sent to Africa as 'jazz ambassadors’. Without their knowledge they were used as ‘weapons’, cultural smokescreens for more sinister activities including the murder of the country’s first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba which involved the Belgian royal family, the CIA and business interests.