Get ready, 'Soundtrack To a Coup D'etat' will simply blow your mind

Members of the M23 armed group sit on a pickup truck during a patrol as women carrying fruits walk past a market, following the takeover of the city by the M23 movement in Bukavu on February 18, 2025. [AFP]

Congo has been on my mind this week. First, I went to the barber, which is rare. He's Congolese, as was his predecessor, Richard, who has since migrated to the Yues.

I also had a chance encounter with another DRC national, a petite young woman who sold plastic phone screen covers. She did not state her name and I did not enquire, especially when I realised she could barely express herself in Kiswahili. And when I made my payment, it reflected a Kenyan man's name.

DRC has also been on my mind since I watched Johan Grimonprez's searing film on the birth pains that continue to derail the nation's liberation from rapacious Western powers, led by the United States.

Soundtrack to a Coup-D'Etat intersects jazz, Cold War politics and colonisation to explain the murder of DRC's founding premier, Patrice Lumumba, after only seven months in power. Then, as in now, DRC was under "UN protection," which is shorthand for Western-sanctioned continuation of neo-colonial exploitation.

This film will blow your mind, not just in its novelty in storytelling, but also because of its penetrating analysis of how external actors have continued to derail any prospects of the Congolese people ever enjoying the immense wealth that their country offers.

So, I am enraged that the citizens of a country that's larger than the entire Western Europe put together, and potentially the world's riches, are still roaming the world selling phone covers when not seasonally grooming shabby men.

As we say where I come from, may those enjoying DRC's wealth that's illegally acquired burn their bellies as they doze in the hearth.