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

So it's a collecting venture.

And this is why it seemed to me a good idea to have this piece ahead of the three kind of short pieces I've written about museums where there are African artefacts and African objects and actually African bones and skulls as well for that matter, although they're not on display these days.

yeah i mean you know part of that mission yes this is also i'll come to the loris right away but this is also a big issue for example at the royal africa museum it's now just called the africa museum in outside brussels the question really being what constitutes grounds for restitution let's just leave the human remains aside for the moment but can we figure out we want to enact restitution

So what are the rules of this going to be?

We're going to have to say something roughly like anything that can be shown in the record to have been acquired by looting or deception, which includes the promise of payment that's never fulfilled, has in theory a right to be restituted.

The people from whom it was taken, in other words, their descendants, can have that object back.

And by the way, there are many, many people who are interested in the

in having these objects packed.

In Larisse's case,

because he was the kind of chronicler, the informal chronicler of this massive passage across Africa, the top of Africa, basically, well, sub-Saharan Africa.

He often recorded episodes of pure robbery, really, and deception, and of members of the team led by this guy, Marcel Griel, a very good ethnographer, being told to kind of lure away the guardians of sacred shrines and then

for the others to nip in and remove these objects, some of which, of course, have been on display in the Musée de l'Homme for generations.

And they've now moved into Chirac's relatively new museum at the Quai Branly.

But the Quai Branly holdings, they're full of contentious objects.

I think Larisse does a wonderful job of saying just how much it's a case of pilfering and cajoling and deceit to build up and reinforce the grand collection as it already exists.

And they came back with massive stuff and all the way through there,

what I call a royal progress.

Crates of this, that, and the other were shipped back, you know, I mean, it was an unbelievable thing.

So yeah, it's quite evident from Larisse that there's a lot of pilfering.

And he says, you know, actually, we're like a bunch of bailiffs coming in, you know, kind of removing everybody's stuff without their consent.

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