Novara FM: In Search of Red Africa w/ Kevin Okoth

Novara Media

Philosophy, Society & Culture, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 2 November 2023

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the second half of the 20th century, revolutionaries across Africa were striving towards a decolonised future that never fully materialised. Folding together Marxism and Black radicalism, the global project of Third Worldism envisaged complete liberation, not only from colonial powers but from every kind of oppression.

Kevin Okoth, a political theorist who grew up between Kenya and Germany, believes it’s time to reacquaint ourselves with the revolutionary politics of ‘Red Africa’ – the title of his first book. Rivkah Brown talks to him about the unfinished business of writers and activists like Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney and Andrée Blouin, and asks if the nation-state can still be a vehicle for a liberation.

They also explore the legacy of decolonial studies on Black America, whether Beyoncé is a vehicle for Afropessimism, and what historical parallels might be found in the concept of ‘Judeopessimism’.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Jens Wolfakis, I'm at Novara Media and I have a message for you, the best way of
0:07.7	underpinning any kind of potential resistance to a very toxic establishment without being
0:16.2	populist anti-establishment and by supporting good, irrational, humanist causes is to support
0:24.1	left-wing media like Novara Media. Novara Media and all such media need your support
0:31.9	because they certainly do not have the support of the establishment. Kapadeem.
0:54.4	In 1955, delegates of 29 countries from across Asia and Africa gathered in
1:02.0	banding Indonesia for the world's first Afro-Asian conference. As the once great ruins of empire
1:09.2	sank like Ozemandius into the Sahara, currently and formally colonised nations got together to plan
1:15.6	how to rise up. Military, political and economic cooperation, non-alignment with either side of
1:22.2	the Cold War. A coalition that recognised the obvious differences between its member states,
1:28.5	but that they had one thing in common, all under the boot of racial capitalism, all were part
1:36.0	of the Third World. Yet this banding spirit as it came to be known, a project of collective
1:42.4	national liberation enabled by networks of mutual support, was quickly and brutally extinguished.
1:50.0	In the years between 1961 and 1973, no fewer than six African independence leaders, including
1:59.0	Medi-Benbaka of Morocco, a Milka Cabral of Guinea-Besau and Cape Verde and Patrice Lemumber of Congo,
2:06.8	were assassinated by their former colonial rulers. All were socialists. All were replaced,
2:14.4	either through military coups or strong armed transitions, by leaders happy to make deals with the
2:20.4	devil. People like Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya used the language of African socialism to woo the
2:27.5	masses, all while aligning themselves with Western superpowers, in return for inward investment
2:33.7	and diplomatic power. Former colonies subjugated by law became neo-colonies bound by structural
2:41.1	adjustment programs. Half a century later, this mass betrayal of African people has been all but
2:48.0	forgotten. Kevin O'Coff wants to change that. O'Coff grew up in Germany in Kenya, so knows a
	...

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