Formidable, fearless energy at the heart of art icon Koyo Kouoh

Koyo Kouoh sweeps into the dramatic volumed, art-filled lobby of the Silo Hotel in a scintillating green dress and a pair  of trainers.

Her clothing choices mirror her formidably glamorous citizen-of-the-world élan. This is a smart person with both feet firmly on the ground, as demonstrated by her successful management of arguably one of  the most visible and important art institutions on the continent.

The executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa tells me in the lift on the way up to our five-star hotel breakfast that she has been on the job for four years.

I feel a little shocked by the passage of time because the museum, with its spectacular Thomas Heatherwick design that put it on the global art map, feels like it has only just become a fixture of our cultural landscape.  

Koyo was born in Cameroon and educated in Switzerland before building an international curatorial career and winning plaudits as one of the leading  art curators in Africa. But it was Senegal where she planted seeds of deep connection when she set up the Raw Material Company art centre.

“Dakar is just an amazingly beautiful place and the generosity, the sensitivity and tenderness, the gentleness of Senegalese people — you come to South Africa for the landscape, you go to Senegal for the people.”

After travelling to work in South Africa for more than 20 years and now living in Cape Town, she concludes unsurprisingly that South Africa is “complicated”.

“It is a healing country. I like to see countries like living organisms, living bodies. It’s a breathtaking country in terms of its beauty and landscape. South Africa is generally amazing, we know the history, we know the complications, we know the atrocities, the heritage of violence and discrimination and that it takes time to transform.

“We know the insularity of the country as a result of this legacy, it closed itself off because of sanctions for the longest time, and also it bred the idea of being unique, which is of course delusional.”

Nevertheless her vision is one of abiding hope for our collective future, which counts for something given the unique prism through which she understands our nation.

“I strongly believe South Africa is one of the great African countries. I have a lot of optimism for the future and I have a lot of faith in South Africa’s capacity to be reborn in ways that are beyond our wildest dreams. I would like to live long to see what South Africa will be in 30 or 50 years.  

“But the weight of the history is so heavy that you cannot not see it, and you cannot not feel it and you cannot not address it. That’s what also to some extent makes my work here at the museum extremely exciting and interesting and challenging. Even though you know the museum is in South Africa, it’s not a South African museum — it is an African and an African diasporic museum. I see it just from interacting with our visitors, who thank me for bringing artists from other places to South Africa.”

We delve into how her African rootedness informs her world view. “I am of that generation of Africans who really inhabit the world as a stage, and I come from a cultural background. I am Cameroonian, we are notoriously fearless people and there is this sense of freedom, and a sense of assertion that I think I was given growing up in those lands, a strength in who we are and how we look at the world.

“I was born in the late ’60s — the generation that was raised by people who basically made contemporary Africa. People who were young adults, young professionals in the ’60s after independence, it was a very promising time all the way to the mid ’80s. There is this sense that we can fix this, that we don’t owe anyone anything.