Red Africa w/ Kevin Ochieng Okoth

Politics Theory Other

Kevin Ochieng Okoth joins PTO to discuss his new book, Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics. We talked about the concept of Afropessimism and why Kevin believes it relies on a fundamentally parochial, US-centric understanding of Blackness and we discussed how it's leading theorists mischaracterise the work of thinkers such as Frantz 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 sceptical 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. 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 Afropessimism - and his extraordinary claim that Palestinians have more in common with their Israeli oppressors than they do with black people.