Koyo Kouoh

Not only did she put on groundbreaking shows, such as Johannes Phokela’s Only Sun in the Sky Knows How I Feel (A Lucid Dream), she intrinsically knew how to navigate the thorn-strewn path of the art world.

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Unlike the in-vogue Insta-star curators who have emerged out of nowhere to steal artists’ spotlights — curators with no appetite for the painstaking research, theory and writing work required in addition to administrative nous — Koyo Kouoh knew that art’s glamour is fleeting.

With 35 years of experience as an exhibition-maker and writer, she had the life experience required to subdue her own status in deference to the artists she worked with.

Artists are not the easiest people to work with, even when visionary curators champion them, and why should they be easy to work with? Their demons and economic woes are insurmountable and often inscrutable. But Kouoh understood that. She understood the process of making art, as with the collaborative instinct of curatorial work, is gruelling work.

This work — invested with intellectual rigour, community-building, institute-building, shared belief in art as the ultimate saviour of humanity, art as not only a form of resistance but an exploration of joy, of survival, of thriving, art not just political but a spiritual force — all this inevitably takes its toll on the achievers.

Although the official cause of her death, according to a statement by her husband Philippe Mall, was cancer, it is also not unthinkable that her work claimed its pound of flesh. Her curatorial heroes Okwui Enwezor and Bibi Silva and, totally unrelated to the world of visual arts, Busi Mhlongo, along with many other African and black visionaries, succumbed to cancer.

We have to ask ourselves profound questions. Beyond Western science’s theses on ailments such as cancer, is it possible that, as it affects African women and black folks in large numbers, statistically, could it be that cancer is also a somatic ailment of the soul?