Kevin Okoth

speaker

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

Kevin Okoth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

So I'm super excited to be able to kind of be in conversation with Jeremy and to introduce this book.

Jeremy's written, I just checked today, over 150 pieces for the paper.

I think it's something around that.

So there's obviously multiple collections worth of books that are in that.

But I quite like the essays that you picked for this particular collection.

What it does is basically it documents loads of the complex histories of decolonization in all their facets, and it kind of spans both periods of kind of decolonization from essentially the 1950s into the 1990s, but also before and beyond the consequences of the causes of some of those events.

Your kind of writing has also spanned, I think, some of the most fraught moments in African history, from the Angolan Civil War to the end of white minority rule in South Africa.

So there's a lot in this collection, there's a lot of kind of accumulated knowledge that's packed into these essays about the artists that Jeremy writes about in this collection.

I think the thing that I wanted to first ask you, perhaps if we could maybe, if you'd be interested to talk about, the opening essays talk a bit about kind of decolonization as a kind of broader idea that has become a topic of conversation in the past few years, due not least to Black Lives Matter and the Road Less For Movement.

So you have some excellent essays about the museum and the decolonization of the museum.

But before that,

I was delighted to hear that or to see that you opened your collection with an essay on Michel Léry's L'Afrique Fantôme , which I think is a fascinating piece of literature.

So I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that book specifically and Léry, and then maybe connect that to some of the discussions that you kind of cover in the book about decolonization of the museum and the objects and restitution.

Yeah.

So I think, yeah, just kind of staying on that point a little bit, I think it's such a topical conversation, just even recently reading the report kind of about the British Museum and its holdings and its vast holdings of human remains.

And there's kind of an ongoing discussion that we're having about what that means for the museums to hold these collections.

And I think Jeremy's essays do a really, really good job of exploring that.

I also wondered if you could maybe say a little bit, because I thought that was an interesting thing in that essay as well, about the collecting and its relationship to theft, for example.

And just kind of a final question on that kind of section of your book.

I think it's interesting how you assess kind of the difficulties and failures that some of the museums have had in this kind of project to decolonize.

Showing 1–20 of 73 · page 1 of 4