Jeremy Harding

Awoman waits​ in a bare room for a meeting with her lover, who has been detained as an anti-colonial agitator. He is escorted from the cells by a Portuguese plain-clothes officer. This is Angola, sometime in the 1960s. The couple embrace; he asks for news of their children. Waiting outside, the security man overhears the woman promise to bring the prisoner a ‘full suit’ on her next...

In the past three years​ there have been seven military coups in former French colonies, all in West or Central Africa. Two coups in Mali, in 2020 and 2021, saw a president and then an interim president deposed. Assimi Goïta, a colonel in his early forties, is now running the country. In Guinea, Alpha Condé, a president in his eighties, was removed by the military in September...

Untitled (c.1965)

Photography​ in the industrial age was fascinated by the subject of work. The readying of humans for their roles in the workforce was a minor subgenre of this huge documentary field. A glimpse of labour in the making was provided in the 1930s by the photographer François Kollar, shooting in a desolate concrete chamber where young French children were learning to...

Pensions​ – and ‘the fiscal impact of ageing’ – have long troubled the EU. A European Commission paper published in 2016 noted with relief that ‘most EU member states’ were reforming their pension systems. France is one of them. During his first term in office Emmanuel Macron envisaged an ambitious reform plan, but Covid-19 put paid to it. Re-elected in...