Jeremy Harding

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341 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 2 Jul

Jeremy Harding’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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London Review Bookshop Podcast · Jeremy Harding & Kevin Okoth: Analogue Africa · 2 Jul 2026 podcast

That's really hard to answer in terms of the art, because there was very rivalrous propaganda, which is the nearest thing I can sort of analogize to art in Angola, not only in the run-up to independence, but afterwards.

So the really fraught project was the Angolan project, where you had at least three factions.

In the end, one predominated by the skin of its teeth.

But the rivalry there was vicious.

And thinking back again about what Malderoy had to say about race, one of the rebel movements

paradoxically, or maybe not paradoxically, actually, was backed by white minority-ruled South Africa.

And this movement, UNITA, was a black movement.

That's how it identified.

It didn't like all these mestizos in Luanda, in the capital, telling people what to do.

It wanted to have a black liberation.

And apartheid South Africa was right behind it, because it knew it would completely collapse the New Independence Movement.

So if you want to talk about the actual nitty-gritty of liberation rivalries, there were many.

I can't actually address that for you in terms of the artists.

All I'd say that in Mozambique and Angola, the art scene was a big tent.

There were lots and lots of different experimental things going on.

I mean, there's this guy called Pancho Guedes who was a kind of impresario Portuguese guy who kind of patronized all these young up and coming Mozambican artists and had a sort of salon where people really learned to kind of hone their ideas

think about what it was that they wanted from their art and how it would dovetail with the absolutely overriding problem of how to rid their country of Portuguese rule.

And everywhere that there's a big tent, there is rivalry.

I mean, the other obvious place there was deep rivalry was in Zimbabwe between Zapu and Mugabe's people, including rival armies.

So yeah, nothing's easy.

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