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Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the Ideas Letter podcast, a project of the Open Society Foundations. We speak with thinkers and practitioners exploring unconventional and heterodox ideas from around the world. Each episode features authors who challenge assumptions, provoke new ways of thinking, and help us engage beyond borders. A member of the Ideas Workshop sits down with someone whose book invites us to expand our understanding of a myriad of important topics. To learn more and keep the conversation going, make sure to subscribe to the podcast feed or visit the Ideas Letter. Now pull up a chair and join the workshop. Greetings New Books Network listeners. I have the great pleasure of being here with the writer and author Jeremy Harding, who has a new volume out on Verso entitled Analog Africa Notes on the Anti Colonial Imagination, a set of essays he has written over some years, mostly for the London Review of Books, but there's a brand new Chapter 4 as well, and it's a brilliant tour de force of thinking about culture and politics within this anti colonial imagination. And I'm wondering if we could begin, Jeremy, by if you could define a little bit what is meant by Analog Africa and if you could also say a little bit about what you mean by the anti colonial imagination. And I asked because I'd like to move on a little bit to other forms of the colonial, the decolonial, the post colonial, and see how they contrast in, if indeed they do, with your conception of the anti colonial imagination. So over to you.
- [01:52]
B
Thanks so much, Lenny. It's a pleasure to be talking to you. It's rare. We live on different sides of the Atlantic. Thank you also to New Books Network for hosting this event through Lenny's organization. Yeah, Analog, the subtitle is, has the word anti colonial. But the main title, Analog Africa, is conceived because most of the essays that are published in this book deal with the period of time when analog was the method of transmission of information. It ties up not only with some of the subjects in the book, for example, a grand tour of colonial ethnographers in the 1930s, but also with anti colonialists who were either filmmakers or writers or photographers in the post World War II period. All this stuff was done on Analog, but it's also my own experience as a journalist when I first began reporting from Africa in the 1980s, which is to say that we communicated by fax, we communicated by telex. If we were lucky enough to have a phone where the line worked, we used that. We shot our photographs on cellulose and our films on cellulose. And also I happened to associate modernism, European modernism, and to some extent, American modernism with those media. And I think that many of the people that I've put into this book, many of the artists were great, they had a great understanding of European and American modernism. And I associate this modernism with analog media, as I said. So that gives you some idea of why, to me, it's analog Africa. Although towards the end of the book there's a section called Remasters where the book goes on to discuss near contemporary forms, in fact, contemporary forms of African anti colonialism, a retrospective anti colonialism, I think, which are highly dependent on digital technologies. And I discuss those and the way that these great artists, a couple of them, and a great Kenyan writer, Binyavanga Wanena, were using digital actually, but to evoke and continue the sensibilities of the Analog era. That's the first point, the anti colonial imagination. Lenny. I mean, it's a good question because it's such a broad term that I've used there. But I think what I'm trying to hint at is work by artists, whether they're photographers, filmmakers, writers, painters, who might have gone on to explore their work through in all kinds of ways, with all kinds of reference points. But because of the colonial encounter, which was still ongoing in many of the cases, most of the cases I write about, they found their work turned towards this key preoccupation, which was when will our countries, our people, be decolonized? And this has implications for the work. The work is no longer simply a kind of art for art's sake. But the key challenge then to these producers of art and cultural products is do I have to do propaganda? Is propaganda slightly kind of Nathan, in some way betraying my instincts and calling as a cultural producer? Or is there a way to do smart propaganda which actually honors what it is I do as an artist? Whence the question about the anti colonial imagination? Because I think it's a complex imagination which is always aware that it might drift into kind of coarse propaganda, always aware that if it's good, that it has to keep its own values at heart and be loyal to those it produces. A wealth of enormously interesting work, in my opinion.
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A
You describe your ambitions early on, and I quote by saying, my larger hope is to celebrate the ingenuity with which African artists challenged the colonial order on their own terms. And I wondering, Jeremy, if we could speak a little bit about the question of agency. Because what I have found in some writings, especially in the frame of the post colonial, is sometimes the absence of agency. And you are committed, it seems, to ensuring that no matter how intense the struggle, no matter how violent the environment, that people are never simply left to someone else's devices, that there is always agency, there are always opportunities to negotiate around even the most thorny political situations. And that's evident in every figure whom you contend with in this book. And I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that commitment to agency, if you will.
- [07:10]
B
When I was working in parts of Africa as a reporter, it was clear to me that whether things seemed to be going badly or seemed to be going well, people involved in the anti colonial struggle and are now thinking of after the mid-70s, when a second wave of anti colonial struggle began after the liberation of Portuguese colonies, when Portugal withdrew in 75, there was a new dimension that opened, which was that Angola and Mozambique, above all, were faced with the full night of white minority rule in Rhodesia and South Africa. They were the neighboring states and they asked Angera and Mozambique to pay a very, very high price for their independence and also for their willingness to give bases and intellectual and material support to anti apartheid movements, anti white minority rule movements in neighboring countries. My impression was at its worst that Angola and Mozambique were being hammered into the ground by their neighbors. Now, that situation eventually changed, but in the early to. In the early 80s, right through to about 1987, in a way, it couldn't have been worse. And yet everybody I met had, yes, agency, as any would say. Everybody was committed. If they were failing, you owed it to them to listen to what it was that they felt was going badly. If it was going well, you owed it to them to give an account of how the tables were turning, how the full independence of Angola and Mozambique, for example, was at last within reach. And South Africa, I should add. So agency is a key term across all the players as far as this book is concerned. We're dealing with artists, cultural producers, if you like. And they have a. It goes back to this dilemma about do I do hard propaganda or do I actually commit to what it is that my values, these aesthetic values and ethical values are. There is a kind of tension in the artist, I think, about whether or not pen should be thrown down, the paintbrush should be thrown down, and one should simply join the struggle, take up arms. In fact, in a couple of cases, it was a bit of both. But this question of agency and his wish to throw one's weight as a cultural producer, painter, artist, filmmaker, writer, whatever it is behind the struggle was immense and unmistakable. So, yeah, there was never any question for me that people were robbed of their agency, even when they were losing even when they were being defeated.
- [09:58]
A
You mentioned right now, Lusophone Africa, you know, which has suffered by comparison with other parts of the continent. And you have hung in there and focused your attention and your writing and your mind on different aspects of the Lusophone, if you will, imagination. Why is that? What drew you perhaps more to the Lusophone dynamic than others?
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B
I think it was force of circumstance, Lenny, because really, when I was visiting Africa in the 1980s, I was never based there, or never for more than about seven or eight months. It was those Lusophone colonies, Angola and Mozambique, that were really in the thick of stuff. And my main interest then, which has remained ever since, was how can I report on the outstanding places in Africa where full decolonization hasn't come? Sure, Angola and Mozambique, the Portuguese flag was lowered and the national flags went up in 1975. But immediately a war which started as a kind of disturbance and disruption and kind of destabilization wars began in both those countries and independence was sort of kicked into touch. And I think it's a coincidence, really, that I happened to end up thinking so much about Angola and Mozambique. The coincidence being that these were the guys in the firing line from apartheid South Africa, I'm afraid to say, from Washington as well. And we're having a very, very rough time of it, as you say. So, yeah, it was kind of logical that I end up thinking a lot about these places.
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Your opening chapter, in which you follow this extraordinary trip in the early 30s from Descartes of Djibouti with its main protagonist, Michelle Larius. It's extraordinary how you are able to address the ambivalences so thoughtfully without any finger wagging or tut tutting that Larius embodied similar to Camus in your piece on Camus. It's very hard for one to give Camus history without putting, you know, their finger down on a scale and saying it. In the end, he was X. You don't do that. You don't do that with Laris. And I'm curious, just as a writer, is it a kind of intrinsic commitment you have to human ambivalence that forces you into a position not to take sides, as it were.
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B
Yeah, good question with Larry's, who was a. A young French ethnographer who went on this crazy royal progress by French ethnographers from the west coast of Africa to the east coast of Africa. It took two years.
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A
And it was financed by the state,
- [12:53]
B
largely by the state, but there were also private donations. This was an expedition to swell the ethnographic museums and the various museums in France. But it was basically a kind of expedition of pilfering, robbery, taking stuff without consent, sacred objects and all the rest. And Lirys, who was the secretary of the mission, kept a diary. And the diary is magnificent. And it shows the writer in all his ambivalence. Although I feel by the end that he's turning pretty decisively against this venture, even though it was the career move for him. But he's become an anti colonialist. And another thing about this book of essays of mine is that there are white people in it. I mean, this is something we might go on to discuss later. I mean, I don't think that anti colonialism was confined exclusively to Africans. There were many Europeans who got involved in the anti colonial struggle, including actually in Angola after independence. Many of the Portuguese army officers joined in the independence movement and helped kind of fight as the next wave of the struggle began. So anti colonialism belongs intrinsically to Africans. I can't stress that enough. But there were many, many sympathetic Europeans and Camus was one of them to go back to Algeria. And Albert Camus, the problem with his Camus was that he didn't believe in independence for Algeria. And he had a dream that there could be federation and there could be a way forward without a ghastly war. This idea was a busted flush. It was never going to work. There'd been too much suffering inflicted by French colonialism on the indigenous population of Algeria. But he argued his case very well. And of course I happen not to agree with it. History didn't agree with it either. It's very interesting to watch Camus progress through this nightmare of conscience that he was. That he. The hole that he dug himself, I feel. And as a young man he'd been a very brilliant reporter from Algeria in his 20s and 30s. I mean, he'd been a down the line kind of left wing communist sympathizer. We often find decolonial movements, anti colonial movements linked up with old forms of Marxism and ripped into the colonial administration for the poverty it inflicted and the misery and exploitation it inflicted on indigenous Algerians. But he couldn't take the following step, which was that there would have to be independence in the end. I can't judge these things, as you say, but I can describe them and I know where my own sympathies lie. I've said so, but it's not for me to go kind of setting people straight or wagging my finger at them. I just want to show what it is, what the tensions and ambiguities of those situations were.
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A
And with respect to those ambiguities, help us understand, Jeremy, because you also write on Kamal Daoud, whose brilliant book now, 10, 12 years ago, the Merceau Investigation, kind of inverts Camus the Stranger. But Daoud became, and you play this out especially in Aix en Provence, very reactionary in his politics. Can you get the sense of his transition, how Kamal Daoud became so right wing? How did you understand it?
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B
Yeah, Kamal Daoud's book, his novel, the Mercer Investigation is. Is a completely brilliant inversion of Camus great modernist novel, the Stranger, l'. Etranger. It's devastating and it is ferociously anti colonial in everything that it does. And it's also beautifully judged. You can't kind of fault the book, I think, for the way it answers Camus Bach and says, okay, you write a novel about a nameless Arab who gets shot by a white man. I'm writing a novel about that nameless Arab who has a name and my narrator will be his brother. It's a masterpiece of answering back. The trouble with Dawood, who was. Who was a young Islamist, actually, for a few years in Algeria, was that
- [17:21]
A
when he broke during the 90s, he was in Islam.
- [17:23]
B
Yes, absolutely. Very briefly. That's right. During that very dark period when he'd kind of sorted out his feelings about Islam, he became a commentator and started to write very incendiary pieces about the Ancien Regime, the fln, which had been in power for years. He was getting attacked by the regime, Le Pouvoir, as it's called, on the one hand, and also threatened by radical Islamists on the other. And somehow I think his patience snapped. That's my best conjecture, because I feel that what happened to Dawoud was that rather than repositioning himself very carefully, he just tumbled into a new position, an extreme position, almost as if to say, my own extremism will be tantamount to the extreme pressures I'm feeling from the regime and the extreme things, including death threats that come my way from radical Islamists in Algeria. In some sense, he flipped. And as you say, Lenny, his commentaries have been really, on occasion, over the top. And he's taken a pro Marine Le Pen position, if not officially by insinuation, in some of the pieces that he's written. So he's in a strange place and he's intelligent. I fear for his sensibility, really.
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Moving back for a second, Jeremy, to the first part of your book, the exceptional second chapter that looks at the kind of relationships forged between the Musee de Quai Bran Lee in the British Museum and the African Museum outside Brussels. It's an extraordinary chapter I learned so much from. And I just wonder because of the debate on restitution is still raging, perhaps slightly less so than several years back, but it's still very much on the agenda. You assert yourself in terms of your own position modestly, but it struck me that you're unsure precisely what's the right thing to do. And am I reading you right in terms of restitution? After grappling with the ugly and repugnant history of Leopold and all that that represented for the African Museum in Brussels and what Sarkozy wanted out of the Museer de que Branley, do you feel that you have properly grappled with how you think yourself about what restitution means from a policy standpoint, or do you feel you're just not equipped to be able to arrive at a point of view that you're comfortable with?
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B
Okay, yeah. Another very good, probing question. Incidentally, these three little essays about museums are in the book because I regard museums as now being the kind of center and focus of a continuous global anti colonial imagination. That's why they're there. That's why it seems to me they fit as part of this set of essays, because the debate about restitution has kept the anti colonial imagination alive. In fact, it's given it a new lease of life. In some sense, I feel clear on the policy position in my own mind. I think that restitution is a good idea and I think that it's possible in practice. And I think that the museum that's done the most kind of practical work about what can constitute restitution is, oddly enough, the most reactionary one, the most colonial, the most racist one, which of course is the Royal African Museum in Brussels, which has gone through a fantastic, impressive turnover and a makeover, I should say, and really tried to rethink the museum and all its holdings and how the colonial era is presented. And I think it's done a very good job. It is not a sufficient job to many Congolese historians, museologists and scholars. They don't feel that it's gone far enough. But the practical work on restitution is really very thorough in Brussels and it involves on what grounds is there fair restitution, what practical manner of restitution should there be and under what circumstances? So if I have reservations, they're to do with practicalities. I mean, a very, very good example, unfortunately, is the museum of West African Art, which is scheduled to open in November and receive fabulous bronzes from which were ransacked and stolen from Benjamin City by the British in the 1890s. And yet an argument, a dispute has broken out about who these bronzes belong to. And actually the Museum of West African Art is in a state of suspended animation, really, until some kind of provisional settlement emerges. And this kind of episode is enough to worry anybody, including the people in Africa who know that they want their sacred objects restituted and those in Europe and America who are actually very, very keen to put the restitution process in order. So on policy grounds, I'm with those anti colonial voices who say, look, we need this stuff back. Also, you have to remember that many of these objects, they're powerful objects, they embody the past, they embody the ancestors. The fact that they're not there where they belong is, I think, profoundly injuring. The policy is absolutely a good one in my view. There are many, many people who've thrown their right behind it, even Macron and the German government. It's a question of how this stuff is going to fall into place and be carefully looked after by its proper owners. Although there is a discussion that goes, look, it's no longer your business, you people in Western and Western museums who've hung onto this stuff, what happens to it, just give it back. And that makes a certain amount of sense to me too. But it's complicated. The practicalities are very complicated.
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A
And I don't imagine if the, the National Front or whatever they've been renamed come to power in 27, that's going to be on their agenda.
- [24:22]
B
I don't think they'll break their hearts about stuff going back to its original owners. They'll belly ache about Woke and take various positions like that. But no, you're right, it's just not something that they prioritize.
- [24:38]
A
You distinguish in one chapter between ethnography and social anthropology, and I found it very curious. And you take that contrast to some of the museum holdings too, and the sort of ideology of different museums. Can you just share a little bit about how you contrast those two conceptions? The ethnographer and the anthropologist?
- [25:05]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm neither, but when I was a student studying literature, I was hugely drawn to anthropology and occasionally the English faculty for lectures at the anthropology department. But it seems to me that ethnography. Let's start with ethnography. What does it mean? Why don't we call it ethnology? We should really, strictly speaking, call it ethnology. The study of ethnicities or others. The reason I think it's come to be the term ethnography has come to be so common, is that the real endpoint of ethnographic work is the paper, it's the book, it's the monograph that tells you everything about one particular culture, whether it be large or small. So ethnography is a subdivision of anthropology, but it's also. It's got a kind of autonomy from it, as I understand it as a lay person. I'm sure that practitioners would disagree with me. That's the first point. But the second point, which I find very interesting, is that anthropology took a very interesting and sinister turn under colonial rule. And let me just go back a moment, Lenny, and say that ethnography is the colonial discipline par excellence. It goes out to look at the people under conquest and bring back lots and lots of fascinating information about them to go into brilliant monographs and so forth. But anthropology as a wider discipline also took this strange colonial turn. It became fascinated with the size of people's heads, with bogus notions about whether if we measured, took cranial measurements, we. We could prove that the lesser races deserve to be conquered. And I think this may have been called at some point or other tautologically human anthropology, but it was about digging up remains and kind of sending heads and body parts and hair and all kinds of stuff back to Europe to be examined in order to produce a theory of races, a hierarchy of races. And this is a problem to this day in our museums, whether we're talking about the British Museum or we're talking about the museum in Brussels and others in Germany. There are lots of these remains that are still around, and they were got for racist purposes in the name of racist ideologies, and they prove very little. But there they are sitting there, and people are worrying about how to get them back on both sides of the transaction. Actually, people, people in former colonies want them back. Museum keepers are pretty eager to let them go. It's a complicated and on a practical basis is all I'd say, really, to kind of wrap that discussion up, that this kind of anthropology of race, or an anthropology that was, as it were, instrumentalized for race theorists, ground to a halt in 1945 with the defeat of Nazi Germany. I mean, after all, Hitler had been a particular expert on peoples, particular expert on lesser races. And that was over. And a line was drawn under that kind of anthropology. And a good thing, too.
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A
Throughout the book, you seem to engage what you yourself talked about as discovering a world of parallel Information. And that was a very resonant term for me. I'm just wondering what that. When you speak of parallel information, what exactly do you think you're implying there?
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B
I think I'm drawing on my own experience as a journalist in parts of Africa and encountering very often what you had to do in a military situation or a situation of instability. And a very smart thing to do was to hook up with a local journalist. And then you pay the local journalist and you did your stories together. He or she would file for their organization, you'd file for whoever you were filing for. But it struck me very soon, very quickly in that process, that the journalism in Africa was incredibly smart. It was very much more across what was going on than, let's say, someone like me who was parachuted in and then kind of made their way out after a month, week, two months, whatever that is. Part of what I'm thinking about, that parallel information, the other part I'm thinking about is the artists and cultural producers who are in this book, Analog Africa. They are also producing a kind of parallel information which wasn't generally available to the west, who were the main consumers of whatever it was I might write or my colleagues in America or Europe would write. There was a whole world in there of extremely good information relayed on the one hand by marvelous artists, if you could call it that, Korvenda. On the other by brilliant journalists. I mean, real class acts. I mean, I came to discover very quickly that journalism in Africa was a class act. And of course, long after I left off reporting, and once we hit the digital era, it became obvious to the rest of the world that journalism in Africa was of a very, very high quality. The problem was, at the time in the Cold War, it was hard for them to get that stuff out to audiences beyond their own countries, I mean, let alone to the continent as a whole.
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A
And it's one reason my friend Howard French throws up his hands repeatedly at the parlous nature of Western writing, Western journalism on Africa, because he knows there are so many fine journalists to be mined. And yet the New York Times and others have often failed dramatically in telling the stories on the continent. Jeremy, in the book, you don't put yourself in there very often, if at all. But there's one point in the essay on Binyavango Waina. Yes, the Kenyan writer who died tragically a few years ago and made famous, of course, for his Granta essay, How to Write like an African. You implicate yourself somewhere in that piece. Can you remind us about that and why you do.
- [31:53]
B
I do. Leni. It's partly because Binyavanga published this wonderful piece, this scurrilous satire about the way that. I'm sure Howard French would have loved it. The way that journalists like me, aid workers, travel writers, or, let's say, elegant literary travel travelers like Naipaul. Fierce Naipaul. The way they chose to describe Africa was, in Binyavanga Waina's terms, unforgivable. And although it was a polemical piece and very, very short, and if you haven't read it, anybody who's listening, I strongly advise you to do so. It's extremely funny. The piece was published in Granta, and it led me to think that, yeah, I'd been published in Granta in a previous incarnation under a different editor back in the 80s, and something I noticed and felt I should take myself to task for, you know, without wringing my hands over. It was something that Binyavanga had put his finger on. And it was a piece I'd written for Bill Buford, who became the editor of granta in the 80s and turned it into the most exciting magazine on the block. As far as I was concerned. I thought it was just mesmerizingly good. And to be published there was, you know, quite something. Nonetheless, the style of the editing meant that there was less exposition, at least in my case, as a junior writer that had just come on board. Less exposition and more kind of graphic, kind of mise en scene. You know, set the scene, just show, don't tell. And I felt that this was, in my case, doing a disservice to stuff I wrote about in South Africa, as it happened. The point being that I was writing about a very, very disruptive and violent series of events in Soweto, in the townships. I had all the detail. I'd been an eyewitness to it. But I also wanted to put some kind of exposition in to say, this is not just beautiful chaos like you'd want to show if you were clever, movie maker. It has a meaning. There is a reason for it, and I want to talk about that. But this was not something that was encouraged. And I take myself to task, or possibly Bill, but not really, for having published pieces that were. That were too much show and not enough tell. I mean, showing is great if you're telling someone how to sharpen a chainsaw or ride a bike. But in writing, I think you have to have more exposition, especially if you're writing about something violent, which I was.
- [34:46]
A
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, in writing about the photographer, photojournalist, I guess, Ernest Cole, whom you write. You say he's a virtuoso in the art of anger management in an era when tempers ran high. Vivid, vivid description that the photographer Cole, convinced authorities he was colored. As a way in which to actually give him more physical access to do his work. I wonder if you could speak to that. And also you talked about the relationship, Jeremy, with the Hustleblock Foundation. That continues to hold on to some 500 of his prints. I'm just wondering why they're doing so. By what means.
- [35:35]
B
Yeah, let me take those two points in reverse, Lenny. The row between the Ernest Cole foundation, which is basically his family, and Hasselblad, is not something I have my head across anymore. When I wrote the piece, that was the situation as it stood at the time. It may have evolved. I happen not to know. I happen not to have looked back on that. But it's a standoff between the family, the descendants of Ernest Cole, who want this stuff back and wish to be empowered by it, I imagine, as well, and the foundation, which has a lot to work out about where it stands on its ownership and why the thing. I don't understand why it's been or was so insistent on holding onto it at the time that I wrote the piece. That's the first part, the earlier part of your question about Coal. You know, the thing about trying to be a. A South African photographer who wasn't white in the 1960s and 70s. Although Cole was out by then, it was nearly impossible. And to be a black photographer was incredibly tricky. And Cole was a junior guy at this marvelous magazine called Drum Magazine, which was, you know, stood out against apartheid, was very kind of reckless. Although the fact that it was edited by white people gave it a certain kinds of security. And Ernest Cole was a junior guy, started in the darkroom and branched out on his own. He started looking at opportunities to take photos and found that he'd run into a brick wall by being black, which he was. He was classified as black. And by hook or by crook, and we don't know exactly how this happened, he managed to convince the authorities to up his status away from black to the next degrading status up, but marginally less degrading, which was colored. And once he got status as a colored person, he began to operate much more freely, even though under severe restraints. But Cole is a. Cole's photographs are magnificent, in my view, but.
- [37:51]
A
Well, there's that one in the end of your book. And I should point out to those listening that the images that are in your book, Jeremy, are just fantastic. And the one you have with Cole, of that boy who's on his tippy toes playing a double bass, you call it a three string bass, as if it's a bass made for three strings, when really it's just a string missing. But he's on.
- [38:17]
B
I'm not sure I checked that out actually. But anyway, you may be right. I thought, oh, this is just a beaten up bass. But then looking into it, I thought, well, maybe not. But anyway, who cares? It's a beautiful photo.
- [38:27]
A
Incredible. Yeah, it's an incredible photo.
- [38:30]
B
Yeah. That was in the days, in the run up, I think, to Cole's departure. He had to flee South Africa. He was in trouble. He was in trouble with the authorities, with the apartheid authorities. And I think the trouble was. But I can't. I've conjectured about this without knowing the truth. I think the trouble was that the apartheid authorities wanted to turn co. They wanted to make him an informer. And he knew then that his time was up, that he was damned if he was going to do that and he had to get out of South Africa.
- [39:03]
A
And you note that his friend, the New York Times journalist who became managing editor Joseph Lelyville, also thought that could be the case and obviously put a strength on their relationship.
- [39:14]
B
Absolutely. He thought that Cole was an informer. Although he says somewhere that he came to regret that view about Cole later. He was pretty sure that Cole was under. I think it's safe to assume that Joe Lell felt the authorities are always onto him, so he must have something to give them and he must from time to time be giving it. But in fact, I think they were onto him and he was playing a very clever game until he'd simply run out of road and we'd have to betray somebody or give up some names, you know, that's when he was out of that.
- [39:49]
A
Yeah, yeah.
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B
What a great legacy as a photographer.
- [39:53]
A
Yeah. Exceptional stuff. Jeremy, just two, two last things. One on Victor Serge, because you knew his son, interviewed his son. And by the way, you. You write on Victor Serge, I'd like to quote you again because it's so lovely. The holes in the soles of his shoes are the stigmata of the exemplary defeated revolutionary. Just lovely.
- [40:20]
B
His body was found and taken to a police station in Mexico City. And the son found him at the back of the police station. And the first thing he saw were the shoes and the holes in the soles. Yeah, Very, very touching, really. I didn't actually Know that. But the sun is amazing. But one of my, one of the people I write about, a filmmaker called Sarah Maldoro, French. She was a great anti colonial figure and made at least two stunning films, one a short and one a full length feature about the struggle in angola in the 1960s as it was just getting underway. And they're marvelous films. She was very interested in left wing politics. She had taken up with a senior member of the Angolan liberation movement, the most credible one in my opinion, and spent quite a lot of time not only in Algeria, but in Guinea Bissau, another Portuguese colony, before it was liberated. But she was also fascinated by a huge spectrum of, of thinking and politics. And she wasn't even only involved in politics, but she made the most marvelous film comparable in quality to Sambizanga, which was a feature length film based on a short story by Victor Serge, the left oppositionist who'd run Foul of Stalin, about a hospital in Leningrad which is built in the 30s, which, which is basically a place for detainees. You know, it's a forerunner of a certain kind of gulag where you put people, actually it's contemporaneous with the gulags, but where you put dissenters and call them mentally disturbed. And the film is. The film is marvelous and I think it's a tribute first to Mal's versatility and the breadth of her intelligence. She insisted on being called a black film maker on some occasions and on others saying, no, don't call me a black filmmaker if you're going to reduce me to that. I am black and everything else. I'm black and more. And the Leningrad hospital proves that point, I think, beyond doubt. But it's important to me because I think it shows us how much transaction there was between the anti colonialists, the African anti colonialists and the left wing modernists in Europe and America in the above all in the 40s. But then retroactively, looking back on the 30s and what had happened to the Soviet, the Soviet project under Stalin and one of my minor ambitions in this book is to model up slightly the distinctions between an absolute separate Africa and an absolute separate west. Because in most of the cases I'm writing about, there is a thoroughgoing interaction. And the Africans in my book are borrowing very heavily and very cleverly from the European modernist repertory and turning it, they're reinventing it for situations of their own to marvelous effect. Meanwhile, a lot of African art is disappearing into galleries in Paris where it's been sold for a fortune, but also a lot of Europeans like Picasso have evolved a profound fascination, if not a proper understanding, I dare to say, of African art, which they referred to at the time as primitive. On the contrary, it was grand art that informed their own. So, yeah, this mix up is embodied in Maldora's film the Leningrad Hospital. It does the job, almost does the job that the book hoped to do, really.
- [44:21]
A
And the book does, in fact, in spades, in terms of expressing this kind of. Let's call it a syncretic amenaturation.
- [44:30]
B
Yes.
- [44:31]
A
Which. Which takes me to the last question and sort of where we began with. And I. I didn't fully explore it. And I'll tell you a brief anecdote. I was. I was at a. A retreat of a British university. I was invited by the rector to sit in. And he asked at the outset all his deans, all his heads of faculty, as they went around the table to explain how they were proceeding to decolonize their respective curricula. I found it quite astonishing, actually. The question and the whole sort of theatricality or performativity of it was quite. But I do wonder, Jeremy, if you feel there is such a project around the decolonial imagination, that is to say, whether a museum or university or library of whatever sort can be decolonized and. And what that means to you, someone who was so active and intellectually and politically engaged during this post colonial moment where the sort of cultural projects were so profound, as you've described throughout the essays. What does it mean to have a decolonial imagination, as so many would like to have it today?
- [46:02]
B
I have only the most fragile, tenuous connections with universities, so it's difficult for me to understand what is fully unfolding in that notion of decoloniality. Course, I have a grasp of it, but I don't have a working experience of it. But I do think, Lenny, that it's a good project. That's to say it begins around the time of Orientalism by Edward Said, the publication of that book. It's saying, look, let's have a look at all these assumptions. And I think this ties up with Binyavanga Wainanga's essay How to Write About Africa. Okay, that's a pastiche, but he's decolonizing late in the day, the kind of Western imagination, the complacent Western imagination, about going in and telling everybody what to do and what it is you personally think. I think there is a lot to be done. And there is already a huge body of work about how we read difficult novels. Difficult would be Joseph Conrad. That would be the epitome for me of a very difficult novel that needs to be unpacked by modern readings, by modern forms of teaching. So I'm not at all against the idea of decolonizing literature or theory. The manner of its doing would matter to me very much. How that was done would determine and affirm the value of the project. And so I'm basically in favor. And I think that to go back to the museums, it's paid off. We've got a proper full on debate, as you say. It may be tailing off momentarily, but we've got a full on debate about where stuff belongs, who it belongs to, what the rights and wrongs of pillage and pilfer are. And they're very clear to me. So I just don't have. I don't really have an issue about the idea of decolonizing discourse, decolonizing scholarship. But as I say, it's a question of how people go about it. And that question to me is whether or not I find it useful. But it obviously serves an enormously important purpose, even though there are some people who, there are some opponents who seem to have had it up to here for reasons I don't entirely understand. But I can guess.
- [48:28]
A
I read a review of your memoir, Mother country, that came out 20 years ago in which the writer and the observer described you as having an unpushy intelligence. And I thought, listening, Jeremy, to our conversation over the last hour, I think that's quite opposite because you're writing and your words here are very unpushy. They're critical, they're open, open hearted, they're open ended, they allow for ambivalences and they're thoroughly erudite, you know, and to be able to sort that all out is an achievement. And as a close friend of yours and mine called you, Jeremy, he said, is the gold standard. And this book is the gold standard. Analog Africa, Notes on the Anti Colonial Imagination, just out from Verso that I can't recommend more highly. And the person actually who I was referring to has a blurb on the back. So if you want to know who that is, get the book, read the blurb and then read the essays. Jeremy, I can't thank you more for your time and your wisdom.
- [49:37]
B
Thank you so much.
- [49:39]
A
Wisdom.
- [49:39]
B
I'm not sure, Lenny, but thank you so much. It's great to see you. Okay, all the best, Jeremy Sa.