Jeremy Harding

speaker

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

And it turned him, certainly, I mean, he was never disposed towards

the colonial idea, the colonial project.

But I think it turned him into a very, very dogged anti-colonialist.

In fact, I know it did.

And he went on to write a wonderful ethnography of the Dogon, an ethnicity in Mali and their secret language, which is said to be a masterpiece.

I think the museum that appears to be the big one, that appears to be ahead of the game, is the African museum outside Brussels, Tivur, because they've really had a crack at doing it.

And they closed the museum, I can't remember, I think it was in 2017 for five, six years or more.

And it was also a museum in desperate need of a decolonization because it was steeped in King Leopold's ethos, and the ethos not only of the Belgian state

their kind of colonial attitudes, but in the ethos of the Congo Free State collectors, of whom Leopold himself was a magnificent patron.

And it was all about a land of savagery.

And there were incredibly grotesque kind of gilded plaster reenactments of noble agents from Leopold's Congo putting down the strong, passionate, capable and native, nonetheless not quite capable enough to crack the force and the goodness of the Belgian force publique.

So it was, I mean, I remember visiting in the 90s.

I began by finding it very, very, very funny.

I mean, I was laughing all the way through, and then towards the end, I just stopped laughing somehow.

And going back and seeing this project that's been undertaken, and it's taken a long time,

I find myself really impressed by it.

And it's very contentious.

Not all museum goes like it.

And also not all the Congolese diaspora in Brussels and the rest of Belgium are very happy with it.

I mean, there are many people who work to,

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