Transcription of the podcast

[00:00:00]
[Lotte]
From the roof of the farmhouse, the sparrows are whistling merrily. Work is underway here. The land is being plowed and the manure is being spread. Ugh, I pinch my nose. The stench of ammonia stings my throat. I’m Lotte, and I’m standing in the mud in the North Limburg countryside. In the distance stands a barn housing a million chickens and more than 20,000 pigs.
Enjoying the fresh air outdoors? Hmm.. The air we breathe here is equivalent to passively smoking four to five cigarettes a day. A little further down the road, neighbors are filing a lawsuit against a lily grower. They’re concerned about the use of pesticides near their neighborhood.
[00:01:00]
[Martha]
High up here in the attraction, you can see it clearly: on the left, the Antwerp ring road and on the right, a densely built-up residential area with little greenery. Not far away, if you look closely, you can see the lights of the petrochemical industry and the boats in the port of Antwerp. I’m Martha, and I’m at the Sinksenfoor, an annual fair in Antwerp. Research shows that the air quality at this location, precisely at this spot, is among the worst in Flanders.
[Fairground operator]
Okay, okay, now it’s time for the real thing. On to the 85 meters, at the top, a five in the sky, rain, rain, rain.
[Martha]
Looking at the visitors, it doesn’t seem to bother them much. They’re screaming their lungs out.
[00:02:00]
But the issue is alive and well in the neighborhood. On my bike ride to the fair, I saw all these posters hanging in the windows. Posters demanding the right to breathe. “We are breathless,” I saw, for example. And in one window, someone had hung a gas mask as a special effect. The right to breathe. Can you claim a right to breathe? Are we entitled to it? Can’t you just take air for free? [BREATHING] Ah, look, I just took a breath. Or is it not that simple after all? [BREATHING]
[00:03:00]
[Lotte]
The Cameroonian philosopher and professor Achille Mbembe, the 2025 Spinozalens laureate, writes about the right to breathe. But what does he aim at with this right to breathe? And what other ideas of Mbembe’s are interesting? In this podcast, you’ll hear from three experts about Mbembe, one of the most interesting thinkers of our time.
You’re listening to Kluwen.
[Harriët]
The right to breathe literally means that you should have the right to breathe. So, the air you breathe provides you with air. And currently, that’s not the case everywhere, not all the people have equally the right to breathe…  everyone breathes, but the quality of the air we breathe isn’t the same everywhere.
[00:04:00]
[Martha]
This is philosopher and activist Harriët Bergman. She researches climate inequality.
[Harriët]
Achille Mbembe wrote an article about the universal right to breathe during the COVID pandemic, when of course, yes, that’s a disease, a virus that also attacks your lung. So it has something to do with breathing.
And then he [Mbembe, ed.] says, yes, a certain war language is being used against COVID, but actually, the right to breathe is being threatened in many more ways than just by COVID. Also, because of how the state treats certain people, they actually have less opportunity to breathe properly than others.
[Martha]
Okay, so our right to breathe is being threatened. But how does that work? Isn’t oxygen free in the air? Can we have a right to something that’s practically all around us?
[00:05:00]
According to Harriët and according to Achille Mbembe people can have this right. It’s even a fundamental right.
[Harriet]
Yes, that’s interesting, because on the one hand, when people talk about: can you have a right to something, it’s a bit like, can you have the right to take that for yourself, right? Are you allowed to take this right away from others? So, for example, with the right to water: does one person have a greater right to water than someone else? Does a company, for example, have the right to divert a river, or not? Yes, but with the right to breathe, it’s essentially a dot that’s set: this is the minimum that must exist. So, this mustn’t be threatened by others, by industry, by the state, or by other people. The right to breathe is something you really must have, so it’s supposed to be a kind of fundamental right. People say: the right to breathe is self-evident, it just hangs in the air.
[00:06:00]
But just as water supplies are sometimes threatened, or the very possibility of life is threatened, so too is our air quality and our ability to breathe. So the right to breathe has a symbolic component, but also a literal one.
And if you look at air pollution, for example around the Antwerp ring road or in Amsterdam near the Coentunnel, but also all other areas where, for example, a lot of pesticides or nitrogen are in the air, you see that the air quality is deteriorating and that people really no longer have the opportunity to breathe.
[BREATHING]
The most glaring example of where the right to breathe has fallen short
[00:07:00]
is with Ella Kissi-Debrah, a nine-year-old girl in London, who lived in an area so polluted that she developed asthma. She ultimately died at the age of nine. Research shows that air quality may have had a major impact on her.
And the court ultimately decided that she was deprived of her right to breathe by the high levels of air pollution surrounding her home.
[Martha]
Access to healthy air isn’t equal for everyone, says Harriët. Moreover, that distribution isn’t simply a matter of luck or bad luck.
[Harriët]
Ella Kissi-Debrah is a black girl, so a girl of color, and we often see that the living conditions of poor people and people of color are worse than those of white people or rich people.
[00:08:00]
And we also see that color is more decisive than whether there’s money in a particular neighborhood. This is called climate racism or environmental racism. Environmental racism or climate racism is essentially about the fact that the impact of certain types of pollution or climate change affects certain groups more than others.
And in the case of climate racism, it hits people of color harder. And also in environmental racism. So racism affects people like Ella Kissi-Debrah harder than, say, you [Martha, ed.] or me as white women. The pollution we see plays out both within national borders and in the global environment. So you can point out that certain groups in a city are much more vulnerable to premature death or are more vulnerable to poor living conditions.
[00:09:00]
We also see this on a global level, so that the global south will be hit harder by climate disruption. Certain countries will suffer more from pollution than Western countries and will bear the burden of that.
So even on a global level it is unevenly distributed.
[Martha]
Phew, when you hear Harriët talk like that, it sounds incredibly unfair. But she doesn’t seem surprised. She believes it fits into a larger picture of inequality, everywhere in the world. [An inequality] that has a very long history and also proves to be very persistent.
[Harriët]
The unfair distribution [of air]  is caused by people acting unfairly, in the sense that they take more than their fair share or emit more than their fair share [to which they are entitled]. And then you can look at Western countries that emitted a great deal of CO2 during the Industrial Revolution, but have continued to emit increasingly more CO2 in recent years.
[00:10:00]
even though they know it’s wrong.
You can think of countries that are specifically behind in policy and essentially accept the resulting casualties. But you can also think of industries, such as large corporations, that also avoid their responsibility. Sometimes, that responsibility is forced upon them through lawsuits and similar procedures.
But the unfair distribution actually stems from inequality in the world that people exploit. This inequality consists of certain people being given more than others, having more opportunities to pollute and seizing them with both hands. This unequal distribution also persists because there are obstacles in the way of achieving a more just approach, thus a form of obstruction to justice.
[00:11:00]
[Martha]
Why aren’t we all deeply outraged by the injustice Harriët tells us about? The obstacles to justice, she also tells us, have a lot to do with unequal power relations.
If you live in a neighborhood with clean air and plenty of greenery, you’d naturally prefer not to have a highway running through your yard. These thoughts have serious consequences, because those who can live in a stately, wooded neighborhood near a large park often have more money, influence, and power. The same goes on a global scale. If you already live in the wealthier West, why should you care about what’s happening elsewhere in the world?
Especially if it means you might have to make some sacrifices yourself. Behind that
[00:12:00]
indifference there is a logic, according to Achille Mbembe. And he calls it necropolitics. Harriët explains to us exactly what that is.
[Harriët]
Necropolitics is a concept that examines which lives are worth living and which aren’t. It divides who can live and who can die. This is true both literally and figuratively, or more slowly. So, on the one hand, you could say: “Necropolitics is: you must die and you are allowed to live.” But also: this level of pollution is acceptable in this neighborhood. And: this level of pollution is unacceptable in another neighborhood or in another country.”
Mbembe, and I too, say that racism is actually the primary force behind necropolitics. So the right to breathe is based on race, a fictional distinction between people where people of color are allowed to die or should die.
[00:13:00]
and white people don’t. There’s an unfair distribution of oxygen, and you see that in various ways.
You see that for example when a man of color, an unarmed man of color, dies from police violence for example, because he is suffocated or is under someone’s knee, like George Floyd, but also much earlier Eric Garner, which led to the slogan of Black Lives Matter I Can’t Breathe. You also see this in Europe, by the way, where in France someone’s last words were: “I’m suffocating, I’m suffocating.” So you have a literal form of not getting oxygen. But the Black Lives Matter slogan I Can’t Breathe is not just about police brutality, it is also about the quality of the air that people of color breathe.
So that oxygen is not distributed fairly, that due to environmental racism certain places are harder to breathe and people are more vulnerable there
[00:14:00]
to premature death due to air quality. That is also one way I Can’t Breathe aligns with Black Lives Matter. And therefore also with climate change and air pollution.
But who can live and who dies, or what level of pollution or slow violence that slowly destroys human lives is acceptable, you see that in the Netherlands as well, for example. So in certain parts of the Netherlands, for example in Limburg, there’s a lot of air pollution due to the mega-farms and the nitrogen. And a choice to say, okay, we accept this amount of nitrogen in the air; or we accept this amount of pollution in the air because it makes us profitable or makes us a profitable country.
Whether sufficient shareholder profits can be distributed; or because we don’t want to bother farmers. So, that choice between profit, quality, and quantity
[00:15:00]
of life years, that’s also a form of necropolitics. So, in the Netherlands too, you see a form of necropolitics. Which areas are considered as sacrifice zones? For example, in Limburg, where in some places there are mega-farms that are extremely polluting.
Then you can think of Parkinson’s, asthma, and other respiratory-related diseases that truly alter or diminish the quality of life. This also applies to the bulb-growing region in the Netherlands, where Parkinson’s is much more prevalent due to pesticide spraying. Yes, these are certain choices being made. And those choices concern what constitutes quality of life somewhere, and who is therefore allowed to live, or what life is worth living. That, too, is a form of necropolitics.
[Martha]
So there are several ways in which the right to breathe is being harmed. We now know that. First, the right is literally being scaled back, when people
[00:16:00]
are choking due to police violence, such as George Floyd or Eric Garner. They would literally say “I can’t breathe ,I can’t breathe.” Secondly, you can also think of that slow suffocation, the inability to breathe because the air quality has been compromised. This is happening in cities and rural areas. And even globally, there’s a divide between those who get clean air and those who don’t.
But there is also a third form, a symbolic form of breathing, Harriët tells us.
[Harriët]
There’s also a third way people can’t breathe, symbolically. And that’s about how much breathing room there is. Or how much space something, someone, or a group of people is allowed to take. Then you can think of the ways people can organize their lives. The culture that is valued more or less.
[00:17:00]
So actually literally the space you are allowed to take up, can take up and whether it is seen.
[Martha]
Youth worker and author Don Moussa Pandzou tells us more about this symbolic breathing space. He followed the trail of the Kakungu mask from Congo, which, after fifty years in a Belgian museum, is returning to the Suku people in the Kwango region of Congo.
[Don]
[The symbolic lack of breath] exists in so many areas. Just look at our prisons here, for example, but also in the States, where the majority of the people, often people with a migration background, are Sub-Saharan. In America, they are African-Americans, and here in Belgium too.
It’s just that we measure less in Belgium, so we know less about which ethnicities are in that, I often call it the underbelly of society, to use an ugly word, but to still indicate about lives that we don’t
[00:18:00]
to see.
[Lotte]
There are lives in our society that we don’t see, says Don, there’s literally and figuratively less room for them. Achille Mbembe writes that important parts of the identity of entire groups of people are thus symbolically destroyed. We ask Don what Mbembe means by this.
[Don]
I had it, though—I’m going to talk a bit personally—but I’ve often experienced the mismatch between theory and practice. And I’m primarily a practitioner, I’m also a youth worker. And a social worker, I work with young people. And I discovered that the search for identity is a real one.
We’ve been talking about it for years, I have, since young people left for Syria. So young people who radicalized because they couldn’t find their place, their search for identity led them to
[00:19:00]
radical extremes. This process goes on. It doesn’t always translate into extremes, like young people committing attacks or whatever, or glorifying violence.
But you notice, for example, that among Sub-Saharan youth they are looking very hard for roots, to establish roots so they can stand stronger in a very harsh society. A society often shaped, as Achille also says, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
In that capitalist society, I think it’s incredibly important to find roots. And the destruction of that symbolism, cultural symbolism, for me, strongly reflects the fact that those roots are being destroyed and a homogeneous story is being told; a dominant narrative is being told, in which people strive for a single culture.
Just in that very diverse
[00:20:00]
society, where we learn to live with different cultures, many people are challenged to let go of their cultural baggage. To forget who they are, where they come from. So they can integrate—read: assimilate—into the dominant culture. It’s very harsh, what I read when I read it… and I say: yes, but actually, many of our young people, and we ourselves as well—young adults, adults, and seniors—are simply searching for roots
And you often find those roots reflected in cultural aspects, in things your ancestors did, traditions or ceremonies. But by demonizing specific ceremonies, traditions, and cultures, you deprive people of the opportunity to truly experience their identity in a cultural context that is very close to their ethnicity.
[Lotte]
Everyone has cultural baggage, but in the super-diverse society of
[00:21:00]
today, there isn’t enough room for all those backgrounds. What is that cultural baggage? Don says you can think of customs, stories, and ancestral histories that make you who you are today. That you eat stew at home or share Surinamese heri heri, the clothes you wear and how you experience religion. And also what art works you expect when you go to museums and what you call art at all.
In Belgium and the Netherlands, we can admire African or Indonesian art in museums. Don tells us about the origins of these artworks and what it means that these objects from formerly colonized regions are now here, exhibited behind glass as works of art to be admired.
[Don]
Here in Belgium, there are currently more than 800,000 ‘works of art’
[00:22:00]
—I like to use quotation marks here— we don’t yet know their origins, how they arrived here. I’m talking about African artworks, which we call works of art, that’s what I mean. But if you have the privilege, as I do, of being able to travel and talk to all sorts of other people, you quickly realize that, yes, those so-called artworks actually do have a function in certain communities.
And that function can be educational, it can have a practical function as a tool, or the function can be… And that’s a new dimension I’ve just learned because of the studies I’m doing now: some [African] art objects are even considered as people; as ancestors, as objects that have a soul and that are part of the community.
The fact that they are no longer
[00:23:00]
functional within their original community is then exactly as if those persons had been deported. So, in that sense, when we talk about looted art now, the question I always ask myself is: should we only talk about the material, or isn’t immaterial heritage also a matter that we can consider as looted art?
The stories we have here, the migration stories we have here, of people who have arrived here through forced circumstances and are participating in society, bringing their baggage with them. Isn’t that also heritage? Isn’t that also material? Shouldn’t it also be repatriated? Shouldn’t it also be restored? These are philosophical approaches to cultural heritage.
[Lotte]
When you bring together all the heritage of a place, the objects but also the customs and
[00:24:00]
traditions, then that forms a kind of archive, says Don.
[Don]
Yes, Achille Mbembe writes about the African archive… And if you read it like that, without the research I’m privileged to do, you’d think it’s about a paper archive. But it’s about African traditions and culture, and an African way of communicating things.
You know, again, very often we start from a Eurocentric way of thinking, and we think of archiving in the way we know it. Putting it in folders, filing it away, in cabinets, and so on. Just to put it briefly, because this is more or less what we’ve been taught. But now we know, and we realize, that there are other narratives besides our own. And that in some African cultures, for example, there are more oral traditions. Oral traditions, for archiving things to keep stories alive.
[00:25:00]          intergenerational, whatever.
Is Achille Mbembe really talking about a paper archive? I don’t think so. When you talk about restitution, because that’s the umbrella term for looted art that needs to be returned, for me it always involves three things.
On the one hand, it’s about objects, whether they’re art or not; on the other hand, it’s about ancestral remains. That’s also a very important box of Pandora taht we need to open here. And thirdly, it’s always about the archives.
A very concrete example of this, in terms of my practice, I am from Congo.
Congo is a country eighty times larger than Belgium, the size of Western Europe. But the Congo’s borders, if you were to look at them on a map with the naked eye, would be a square. The Congo’s borders were drawn in Ostend, on the dike, by [King] Leopold and [explorer] Stanley. They established what is now the RDC [République Démocratique du Congo], DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo], they determined that.
We have war in the east of Congo.
[00:26:00]
Who says the east of Congo is Congo? I’m putting something in the middle here; I’m just philosophizing here. Today, the Congolese can hardly answer that question, because those maps, those pre-colonial maps, are in Belgium, in the Belgian archives. There’s a great demand for access to those archives, for their return so that the Congolese identity can be reconstructed. So yes, Achille also talks about that, about the different dimensions. And when he talks about the African archive, he talks about all those dimensions, and not just from the Eurocentric perspective we know.
[Lotte]
Parts of the African archive have been scattered across the world due to the history of colonization. As a result, the original communities often no longer have access to the physical objects that are important to them. That’s why we’re having discussions in the Netherlands and Belgium about
[00:27:00]
restitution, the return of those objects that are now here.
But how do you go about that? And is restitution enough? We asked Don how Achille Mbembe thinks about that.
[Don]
I think the answer I find in his work is primarily that we must dare to have this discussion. And that restitution shouldn’t be limited to reparations, but that we must go much further and dare to hear the African voices and perspectives more, namely the African voices or the voices of the people who want their things back, and truly on an equal footing. Because that’s also what I appreciate about him: he dares to point out that power is changing, or that the global leadership is changing; and that, for example, the African continent, among other places, is gaining more and more ground—to borrow a phrase—and is increasingly dictating how they [the Africans, editor’s note] want to be treated.
[00:28:00]
And from that perspective, I always say: look, let’s have the conversation. And
I can only thank him [Mbembe, ed.] for giving us the language, the words, to have the conversation.
[Lotte]
Listening to Don, we begin to suspect why Achille Mbembe receives the Spinozalens award for his vision of future-proof solidarity. Mbembe sees problems, but he isn’t without solutions. He finds hope for our world in connection, between people, but also between individuals and their service environments.
This is what researcher and author Philsan Omar Osman tells us, who, like Don, wants to put the theoretical knowledge of Mbembe and others into practice.
[Philsan]
According to Mbembe, it is also important that when we talk about
[00:29:00]
restitution, meaning the return of stolen art and objects, it also involves talking about restoring relationships destroyed by colonialism; exploring new forms of connection and knowledge sharing. So, how we talk about knowledge, how we transfer knowledge, what knowledge is important. And also how we collaborate. I think those things are still very important to him. He’s also labeled an Afro-optimist, because he truly still has a little hope in how, if we approach each other differently, the future can change. So, a bit of radical hope in how he talks about things.
[Lotte]
Philsan speaks about the importance of knowledge. What we
[00:30:00]
consider as knowledge here often fits within one form, i.e. western science.
We acquire knowledge by reading articles, watching the news, and verifying evidence with our own eyes. But that’s a one-sided view of knowledge, says Mbembe. Don already told us that there are many more forms of transferring knowledge, which are sometimes more dominant in non-Western cultures. Think of oral stories, experiential knowledge, and much more. These sources of knowledge also teach us something about who we are.
[Philsan]
‘To know where he’s going, you have to know where he comes from.’ That’s also an African proverb. So it’s very important that we look at what knowledge we value. What knowledge is being put forward and how we talk about the ‘others’, quote unquote , and what we mean by that. To see that history isn’t actually linear. That it,
[00:31:00]
it’s about things that were happening simultaneously. For example, in the Global North, we were working on universal human rights, while slavery and colonization were happening in the Global South. So those things are really important, I think. And they’re also important for Mbembe.
[Lotte]
We ask Philsan if it then boils down to making room for alternative narratives that deviate from Western understandings of the world. But that’s precisely how Philsan doesn’t see it.
[Philsan]
The story being told now is also seen as a kind of normal starting point, and everything else is seen as an alternative. I think it’s very important, not just for Mbembe, but for everyone involved in this kind of work, that we start to see it differently. That we don’t just label alternative stories as alternative stories. That we also
[00:32:00]
see them as worthy and also as a kind of, yes, we can also start from these stories. These stories are truly equally important, they have equal value, and they can equally well portray the future we want; and [they can] help us get there.
So the stories we tell each other, and the stories that are told about us, are truly important stories. Reclaiming agency or taking back power over our stories, is also a very important process of decolonization, actually.
[Lotte]
How do we do that, starting from those stories? Mbembe believes it starts with rewriting one story we’ve been telling in the West for a very long time: that humanity is superior to nature. He proposes a different narrative.
[Philsan]
When Mbembe talks about the earthly
[00:33:00]
community, he talks about the fact that we are part of a bigger picture. That we [humans, ed.] aren’t actually special, that we’re not at the top [of a supposed hierarchy, ed.], and that everything we see going wrong now is actually because we think we’re on top of everything.
And then he talks about a kind of radical interdependence on each other, and also with the more natural world. That we are part of those [natural, ed.] processes and that we also influence those processes, and those processes also influence us.
[Lotte]
Radical dependency, then, says Mbembe. Humans are part of a natural network, and if we don’t respect our place within it, the consequences are dire.
[Philsan]
Today I saw a video online where someone was talking about it being the hottest summer, the hottest summer yet again. And then someone else said: yes, actually, this is the coldest summer
[00:34:00]
that we’ll ever have. And that helps us visualize those stories about climate change, its impact, who it affects, and how we’re engaging with that planetary community. Simply by someone saying it.
So for Mbembe, but also for many people who are now involved in ecological activism and so on, it is very important that we put ourselves back into those processes [become part of those processes again, editor’s note].
[Lotte]
Achille Mbembe receives the Spinozalens award because, according to the jury, he makes a special contribution to sustainable solidarity. We now have a better grasp of what’s at stake.
[Philsan]
For Mbembe, future-proof solidarity means a
[00:35:00]
form of connectedness that transcends borders, nations, and even species.
So it also comes back to the earthly community. The idea that we’re incredibly dependent on each other and that the future will be determined by how we collaborate. If we don’t find a way to do this work, it’s all over for us. And it might be very pessimistic to say that, when I’m talking about an Afro-optimist! [Philsan laughs]
But that’s also where hope lies. Hope, I think, as someone who is also concerned with what a lot of Black feminists are concerned with; for someone who is in that line of thinking, hope is something very practical. It actually drives you, or
[00:36:00]
It pushes you to truly put your political views to work, to truly achieve things. And so it’s that hope that drives many people like Mbembe: we have so many obstacles we’ll have to overcome anyway; but if we could find a way to work together, we’ll succeed.
[Lotte]
Finding a way to collaborate is easier said than done. It sounds overwhelming. What can we do about the disagreements between world leaders, for example? For Philsan, it starts at a much smaller level. You and I can help build future-proof solidarity today.
[Philsan]
If we then ask ourselves the question what can we do tomorrow, how can we turn theory into practice, then I would say, look for the things that are alive in your environment.
So for me it’s really about how I take my
[00:37:00]
research that’s very theoretical, and make it into something I can use in practice. So, for example, I started working with a small group, an organization called Back2SoilBasics in Brussels, which was started by three friends who had the idea that it’s actually unfair that Black people don’t have access to land, don’t have access to the natural world. And we’re going to do something about that by setting up small projects where we can and invite the community to join us, for example, by planting things and cooking together. We can set up or organize these small-scale projects where you feel like you’re doing something—because you actually are doing something.
[00:38:00]
But also that you contribute not only to your own well-being, but to the well-being of your community. So, for me, these kinds of things are really the first place to start doing things.
It’s wonderful and good to read things, to read books. But those books will always remain theory if you don’t do anything with them. The idea is to build on them, even criticize them. The idea is to incorporate them into our practice and see, okay, how do these theories really work in the real world, in the material world? So I would definitely say: Go outside, go outside. Visit your neighbors, see what they’re doing.
See which organizations are active in your area. And see what you can contribute.
[Lotte]
Go
[00:39:00]
outside, says Philsan. Take those earbuds out and turn off this podcast. Or, wait, stay with us for just one more minute. The Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe inspires many researchers worldwide with his ideas on necropolitics, the African archive, the earthly community, and solidarity. From the right to breathe, Mbembe takes us all the way to the call to appreciate our interdependence.
[Martha]
You have been listening to a podcast by Kluwen,
[00:40:00]
about the work of Achille Mbembe. Mbembe will receive the Spinozalens in November 2025. This biennial prize is awarded to a laureate of international caliber who, in the jury’s opinion, has made a significant contribution to the public debate on a current topic. This year’s topic was: future-proof solidarity.
[Lotte]
Thank you to our guests Harriët, Don and Philsan .
This podcast was created in collaboration with the International Spinoza Prize Foundation, the Wereldmuseum, and Baltan Laboratories, and is made possible by [among others, editors] the Cultuurfonds, Novo Nordisk, imec, and the Municipality of The Hague.
[00:41:00]
This was Kluwen.