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.
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Appearances
Is there anything you recall that you find quite interesting or that you kind of single out as either something that went really well or something that actually just did not work at all in these efforts to kind of engage in this grand project of decolonizing a museum that holds a vast kind of project?
mentioning their names i think would be the the greater the greater discretion yeah better thing to do yeah oh we can definitely move on from that and keep that part quiet yeah there's quite a few essays in here that are kind of about the high points of decolonization in the kind of
a straightforward sense of achieving independence, African countries fighting for or negotiating and achieving their independence.
But you split that into two phases that you write about, that these artists navigate, often overlapping and geographically and temporally overlapping.
I think there's, if I may just read a quote from your book.
Decolonization in Africa was not a fluent process.
The first phase began in the 1950s and went into the 1960s, as most of the continent won independence in a blaze of Pan-African resolve, leaving roughly 50 million disempowered people in Portugal's colonies and the redoubts of white minority rule, apartheid South Africa, Namibia, and Rhodesia.
Decolonization 2.0 was announced by the collapse of the Portuguese dictatorship in Lisbon, followed rapidly by independence in 1975 for Guinea-Bissau, Tloské Verde, São Tomé e Príncipe, Mozambique and Angola.
The new regimes in Mozambique and Angola took the fight to their white supremacist neighbors, Rhodesia and South Africa, with drastic consequences for citizens in their own countries.
then you kind of navigate narrate how this kind of process comes to the second process of decolonization comes to an end with the end of the apartheid regime in south africa so i wanted to ask you if you could tell us a bit more about how the artists you discuss in the book navigated these two phases of decolonization some of them came earlier of course some of them later yeah we have to remember that it between those two phases
And I think the thing that the book does so well is contrast that, for example, with the photographs of what we were talking about earlier as well.
The South African photographer, Ernest Cole, who was shooting under very different conditions than the studio and whose photographs are probably the opposite of some of what you've described, at least during the period of...
He was shooting in apartheid South Africa.
So I wonder if you could maybe tell us a little bit about how he kind of went about shooting those things, shooting his photographs.
And also, if you'd like to just briefly speak also about some of the solidarities that were there and what allowed people to make the kind of work they were making.
For example, Sarah Maldoror in Algeria and being commissioned to shoot film, but shooting under very kind of adverse conditions of the anti-colonial struggle.
Oh, yeah.
No, I mean, that one was just, it's really interesting to talk about the different conditions in which people were photographing at the time when some people are photographing kind of the exuberance of independence.
Someone is kind of covertly shooting, line workers being medically examined or something.
Yeah, and I think also your work in that essay and then, I mean, was it a year ago?
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