Hello and welcome to another episode of The Politics Theory of the podcast.

My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is Kevin Ociang Okoth.

We talked about Kevin's new book, Red Africa, Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics.

We discussed the concept of Afro-pessimism and why Kevin believes it relies

on a fundamentally parochial, US-centric understanding of blackness, and we spoke about how its

leading theorists mischaracterized the work of thinkers such as Franz Fanon to advance the idea of

the impossibility of solidarity between black and non-black people. We went on to discuss

Kevin's idea of Red Africa, a notion inspired by the second wave of radical African liberation

movements and thinkers that were skeptical of the first wave of African socialists, many of whom

who had taken the view that traditional communal elements of African culture were inherently socialist.

Although the interview was recorded before the escalation of the Israel-Palestine crisis,

we do touch on the question of Palestine regarding Frank B. Wilderson III,

the most prominent advocate of Afro-pessimism,

and his extraordinary claim that Palestinians have more in common with

their Israeli oppressors than they do with black people.

Kevin Ocianga Koth is a writer based in London, he's part of the Salvage Editorial Collective,

and is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.

His writing focuses on themes related to anti-racism, anti-imperialism,

and 20th century anti-colonial thought. Red Africa is his first book.

You begin the book by discussing the Rhodes Must Fall protests that erupted in South Africa in

2015 at the campus

of the University of Cape Town. Those protests began with calls to remove the statue of the

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