NAIROBI — Last spring, 30 African artists from diverse disciplines and regions gathered for several days to engage in the difficult but necessary work of discussing generational collective healing, specifically in relation to trauma, war, and genocide. Titled “The Power of Arts and Culture for Healing” and held in Nairobi, Kenya, the convening was curated by Molemo Moiloa and Phumzile Nombuso Twala of Andani.Africa, and organized by the Quaker American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). AFSC provides financial and technical support to trauma healers across East Africa and the Horn, especially in Somalia, Ethiopia, and South Sudan. Our gathering was an all-too-rare opportunity to build these capacities among artists.
Each morning, I opened the day with an invocation — one that would set the right tone for the vulnerability needed to share personal experiences and collective perspectives on trauma and repair. Through artist talks, musical performances, film screenings, a drum circle, and many shared meals, we quickly became a close-knit group. The experience put into sharp focus my belief that the institutional art world — even as a market-driven endeavor — still holds possibilities for radical exchange where the poetic, experimental, political, and even healing values of art still resonate.
At first, I thought that this trip to Kenya would be a way to breathe new air and calm my own spirit from the challenges facing my own community in the United States. But the day before my flight, the devastating news of Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh‘s sudden death from cancer sent me and many colleagues into shock and mourning.
Koyo Kouoh at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2023 (photo by Marco Longari/AFP via Getty Images)
The late great curator Bisi Silva introduced me to Koyo Kouoh in Dakar, Senegal, in May 2014, alongside my friend Simone Leigh. Kouoh, who directed the Zeitz Museum in Cape Town and founded Raw Material Company in Dakar, was slated to curate the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026. Over the years, we have had ongoing, heightened conversations about the state of the global art world, what it means to work in the parallel African and Black American art worlds, and the Pan-African crossroads where we meet. Kouoh’s title for the Biennale, In Minor Keys, considers artistic practice as “refuge and radical proposition,” invoking the means by which artists who work at the boundaries of form operate in more subtle registers. Her curatorial team will carry this work forth in her absence. The moment I learned of Kouoh’s death immediately altered my perspective on my own subjectivity in Nairobi — one of South-South interdependence, an ethos I have also been privileged to inherit as a child of the Black radical tradition.
The convening was curated by Molemo Moiloa and Phumzile Nombuso Twala of Andani.Africa and organized by the AFSC.
This lineage of connection between Black Atlantic diasporas has deep roots. In 1948, Trinidadian-American choreographer Pearl Primus was awarded the final Rosenwald Foundation fellowship to make new choreography on the Blues. Instead, she used the $4,000 grant, the foundation’s largest at the time, to travel to West and Central Africa, where she studied dance and spiritual forms in Congo, Liberia, and Nigeria. She arrived in Africa not only as a recipient of cultural transfer but also as a link in a chain of transmission, contributing to personal edification and development as well as a shared stake in future artworks — dances she would create with and for her community in the Black American dance world.
Nearly 50 years later, one of the very first dances I learned as an undergraduate student at Oberlin College in Ohio, from Professor Adenike Sharpley, was Fanga Alafia of the Vai people of Liberia. It was the first dance that connected me to the African continent in a tangible way. If you’ve studied African dance in the US, you likely learned Fanga first, too, and that’s thanks to Primus. Following her path, I imagined how I might gain critical perspectives from my East African art colleagues about ways forward through our interconnected and distinct circumstances.
Our need for connection feels especially urgent today. Recent “diaspora wars” on social media involving the policing of Blackness weaponized by misinformation about cultural difference have been disheartening, to say the least. Not because we don’t already understand our cultural and political distinctions, but because we cannot prepare for what’s to come by policing each other’s Blackness with blinders on. The convening in Nairobi countered much of this by bringing together artists from across the continent around a shared purpose — a means of building our collective power. Our survival will depend on our points of intentional connection and solidarity.
Pearl Primus in 1951, performing her expressionistic dance piece “Strange Fruit,” based on Abel Meeropol’s poem and song (photo by Baron/Hulton Archive via Getty Images)
For two years, I have been immersed in research on the legacy of the Pan-African and Negritude-inspired cultural gatherings of the ’60s and ’70s: the First World Festival of Black Arts (Dakar, 1966), Carifesta (Guyana, 1972), and FESTAC 77 (Lagos, 1977), among others. The biannual Carifesta event was initiated by the late Barbadian poet and theorist Kamau Brathwaite and his fellow writers in the Caribbean Artists Movement. When I studied under Brathwaite at New York University, he grounded his conception of magical realism in the interconnected catastrophes of the Middle Passage and colonialism on the African continent.
I believe the current resurgence of investment in such gatherings now reflects the spirited energy of a new, revived form of global Pan-Africanism. For example, Loophole of Retreat, a convening I organized in 2022 with Simone Leigh as part of her American Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, and Deborah Willis’s Black Portraitures are a matter of necessity in the current environment. Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley, one of the strongest global voices on sovereignty, strategic interdependence, and climate justice, hosted the 15th Carifesta in August and spoke about the cultural and political necessities of solidarity in the region before traveling to Africa to meet with political leaders.
As I packed my bags for Nairobi in May, I tried to quiet my uneasiness about the immense challenges facing Black Americans, keeping in mind the wisdom of these convenings, which underscore the need for face-to-face gatherings. While I was unsuccessful in leaving my worry behind, listening to artists from Kenya, Sudan, Somalia, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Namibia, and Nigeria at the gathering provided much-needed perspective. I was struck by how making art with the intention of healing can be both a burden and a mode of surrender.
Panel at the convening featuring Hope Azeda (center), who organized the 20th anniversary commemoration of the Rwandan Genocide in 2014
Theatre director Hope Azeda, who organized the 20th anniversary commemoration of the Rwandan Genocide in 2014, spoke at our gathering about being named “Hope” by her mother as part of a generation born outside of the country during the genocide. Her mother wanted her to “run, play, and be free.” But Azeda decided to return to do the important work of healing older generations who experienced the genocide and younger ones who live in the future it created, carrying the trauma of their parents and grandparents.
Azeda’s story exemplifies what Senegalese scholar Felwine Sarr asserts — that primarily Western conceptions of progress depend only on forward movement as success. “To reopen the future first requires a reinvented relationship with their past and their traditions,” Sarr said at a talk at New York’s Cooper Union in 2018. To heal and progress, we must first consider our forebears and ancestors.
Kouoh’s death, five years after the passing of Nigerian curators Bisi Silva and Okwui Enwezor, illuminates the costs of cultural work for Black practitioners. Why should the work of restructuring colonial canons and systems cost us our very lives? Why has the concept of “healing” within art become passé when it is anything but? And how could the realities of diverse global movements guide our lives as artists, curators, cultural workers, and scholars?
Somalian musician Ibrahem Ahmed (left) and Margaret Kowrto (right) of South Sudan at the gathering in Nairobi
Kouoh’s curatorial text for the next Venice Biennale explicitly refers to the work of Patrick Chamoiseau, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Édouard Glissant — Caribbean and Black American giants of literature and theory. One 1993 poem by Glissant, translated by Eric Prieto, looms large:
Look at the creole garden, you put all species on such a little lick of land:
avocados, lemons, yams, sugarcanes… plus thirty or forty other species on this bit of
land that doesn’t go more than fifty feet up the side of the hill, they protect each other.
In the great Circle, everything is in everything else.
My time in Nairobi taught me that individual healing is fundamental to collective resistance. I participated not only as a facilitator and a witness, but as an interlocutor whose very survival is also hinged on our shared interdependence.
Transnational solidarity today cannot be built on nostalgia for the movements of the ’60s and ’70s, but with a commitment to an interdependent future. As Kouoh’s spirit implores, we must continue to work in “minor keys” — operating in subtle registers that offer refuge and propose radical alternatives to the systems that seek to destroy us.
