The DE-0 podcast: debates, deep dives and interviews sparked by the essays at desifr.com. The voices take their own stances; the essays hold the record.
To debate this still feels slightly absurd, and that absurdity is the point. It exposes the double standard this project keeps returning to. Spain keeps the Visigoths. Italy keeps the Lombards. England keeps the Danes. A foreign elite, a short-lived kingdom, a religious minority, a violent end: none of that disqualifies the chapter when the soil is European. Cross the Mediterranean and the same century in Carthage is treated as a Germanic file that merely used an African harbour. From 439 to 534 a kingdom ruled from Carthage. It minted Felix Carthago. It built a navy. In 455 that fleet left the Tunisian coast and sacked Rome. The debate is not whether this happened. It is why the territorial rule of history is ordinary in Madrid and treated as a provocation in Tunis. There is more nuance in this chapter than the old labels allow: continuity and rupture, intermarriage and deportation, reused basilicas and shared floors, a sophisticated Latin culture at Carthage and a Byzantine reconquest that tried to close the book. The useful question is not whether the Vandals were “African enough.” It is why, and when, Tunisia will claim ownership of a history that unfolded on its own ground. For some this will sound provocative. For others it will sound obvious. Either way, the general silence around the subject, in Tunisia and beyond, is harder to justify once the coin, the ports, and the ruins are taken seriously. When a kingdom dies, who keeps its history? The answer is not always in the textbook, or in the box a nineteenth-century curator already labelled. Sometimes it is in the ruins underfoot: the chapters that were kept, and the ones that were quietly filed away.
In 2015, curator André Magnin said Congolese modern art was born from a series of small “miracles”: paper, complete freedom, and a clean start with no lineage. This debate unpacks that claim against the essay it comes from and against the archives, catalogues, and Johannes Fabian’s interview tapes with the painters themselves. One side treats the 1926 turn to paper, the Desfossés studio in Élisabethville, and later market routes (including Magnin’s buying for Jean Pigozzi) as the scaffolding that made a global canon possible. The other treats the same story as colonial erasure: Albert Lubaki was already painting walls; “freedom” meant painting what the patron wanted and selling in secret; after Desfossés died, Pilipili Mulongoy, Mwenze Kibwanga, Kaballa, and Bela taught the next generation; Antoinette Lubaki is in the Beauté Congo show and almost nowhere in the history it tells. The question left to the listener: when you look at that canon, whose hand applied the paint, and whose hand applied the varnish?
Famous newsreels of Paris’s 1944 liberation look like unfiltered victory. This episode asks who was halted at the gates and cropped out so cameras would show an all-white triumph, then traces that erasure across both world wars. In East Africa during the First World War, the British Carrier Corps replaced pack animals with men; recorded porter deaths (about 95,000) dwarfed soldier deaths (about 11,000). In Europe, France deployed some 450,000 African troops; under Armée noire doctrine they were used as shock troops, and West African tirailleurs died at higher rates than white infantrymen, with recruitment met by flight, revolt, and self-mutilation. By the Second World War, Leclerc’s 2e DB had been built in large part by African soldiers from Chad. A Bedell Smith memo helped drive the 1944 “blanchiment”: Black troops pulled so Paris would be liberated on camera by white personnel. Georges Dukson, a wounded Gabonese fighter, walked into the parade anyway, and was removed. On 1 December 1944 at Camp de Thiaroye, unpaid West African veterans back from German camps were fired on near Dakar: the official toll was 35, later estimates run 300 to 400. Pensions were later frozen; Sembène’s film kept the story alive when the archives did not. History here is what authorities allowed to be filmed, paid, and written down.
When Philosophy Is Built on Racism: Keep Both or Stop Citing?
·21 min
The debate is good because it refuses the three lazy exits: pretend it isn’t there, excuse it as “their time,” or just delete the names and hope the institutions they built disappear with them. Speaker 0 is right about the classroom. Omission does not neutralize the insult; it privatizes it. The student who already knows the text is taxed twice: once by the content, again by the decision of whether to blow up the seminar. Putting the sentence on the syllabus is the minimum honest move. Using the thinker’s own method against them is also real philosophy, not piety. Speaker 1 is right about the long game. “Keep both” can become a more sophisticated museum: you still tour the same house, you just add a plaque that says the foundation is rotten. The Senghor point lands. You can read the racial theorists “critically” and still inherit the beam: emotion as African, reason as Greek. Citation is not a neutral reading list. It is who gets to set the terms of the next argument. The useful distinction in the episode is footnote vs. beam. Hume’s 1753 note is a spectacular failure of his own empiricism; you can cut it and the Treatise still stands, while the racism stays glued to the man. Hegel and Aristotle are different. Pull Africa-out-of-history or the natural slave and the system does not merely look stained. It stops working. That is not a side comment. That is the engine. So the practical answer is not “keep both forever” or “never cite them again.” Read them as compromised architects of systems we still inhabit. Teach the counter-voices in the same week, not as extra credit. Then stop pretending citation is just bibliography. If a framework fails its own test, it should lose the status of default authority. That is rigor, not cancellation. The current syllabus does neither. It keeps the compliment and outsources the archive. That is the actual scandal.
The Ledger or the Altar: Who Really Killed Kimpa Vita?
·23 min
In 1704, a twenty-year-old Congolese woman named Kimpa Vita nearly emptied the war camps feeding the Atlantic slave trade: she preached that Jesus was born in Kongo’s ruined capital and that God demanded the camps be abandoned. Thousands followed her. Two years later a royal tribunal under King Pedro IV burned her at the stake with her partner and infant son, urged on by Italian Capuchin friars. Economic self-defense, or a throne protecting the religious monopoly she’d just attacked? A debate that asks if there’s really any difference between the accountant and the priest.
Nordic countries sit permanently at the top of global trust and governance rankings. Much of the Global South sits at the bottom. The pattern never moves. Is this an objective map of reality, or are we simply measuring how closely a country resembles the North Atlantic societies that designed the instruments? This debate examines the blind spots built into the world’s most influential indices. One side defends them as imperfect but necessary adapters for global finance. The other argues they do more than mismeasure: they actively erase highly functional forms of trust and organization that the tools were never built to see. When the only meter you have is calibrated for neon, a room full of candles registers as darkness. The real question is whether we keep forcing every society to install neon, or whether we finally admit the tool itself is limited.
A century of scholarship spent proving colonized peoples weren’t “savages.” Was it an act of historical sovereignty or a distraction that keeps the slur alive and quietly launders the perpetrators? Grounded in the text “Who Had to Prove They Weren’t Savages?”, this debate tests a strict diagnostic: once dehumanizing language is followed by violence and clear material gain, the only legitimate scholarly response is to audit the aggressors. The victims’ humanity is no longer an open question. From Great Zimbabwe and the Zulu to Gaza, the sequence holds. The choice facing historians is clear: retry the dead, or follow the stolen goods.
Current cultural restitution frameworks force African nations to petition former colonial powers under legal systems designed to protect the original theft. European public collections rest on a rigid tripod of inalienable, imprescriptible, and unseizable status that folds even violently seized objects into centuries-old property rules the moment they enter a museum vault. The 2022 “return” of the Kakuungu mask left Brussels as legal owner and Kinshasa as mere custodian. France’s celebrated transfers to Benin required a one-off parliamentary exception that carefully avoided admitting the original taking was unlawful. The Sarr-Savoy report’s call for permanent return was smothered by the same fortress. This debate examines whether the only genuine exit is for source nations to assert original inalienability, declaring the objects were never capable of lawful transfer under their own law, or whether that elegant legal pivot risks trading imperfect physical returns for prolonged gridlock.
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