A love supreme: A requiem for Koyo Kouoh

Bongani Madondo remembers Koyo Kouoh as an activist and a community worker — and curator of collective futures

- Bongani Madondo

This is strange. It's one of those indescribable feelings. Let me take a few steps black to the future.

No, I'm not referring to the fact that the curator and arts administrator Koyo Kouoh transitioned from this heretofore world hardly a harmattan season whipped astir on the hot fumes of Valentine Yves Mudimbe's chariot of fire's zooshing out of planet earth.

It's not that. It is not that — what is strange is this “thing” of happenstance, if it ever really exists. I'm thinking of Koyo Kouoh, subconsciously reframing her into a past, but when I think deeper, I have the feeling that there was always a “pastness”, not ancient, not post-anything, or pre-that about her.

She vibed off energies of beautiful nostalgia, sometimes melancholia, too, even when photographed decked out in loud psychedelic frocks. And this is the “strangeness”, strange not because she was weird, but because we are usually inadequate to language, a phenomenon of a person whose spirit is logged in the past, yet beams with the outlook and vision ferried by radical futurity. A futurity that can be best described by a tomorrow born of today's challenges and less of the unexcisable hunchback of history.

Within this Hegellian metaphysical connections, a spirituality of time and place, of things as they are, unencumbered by humanity's inadequacies to transcend its bodies, its weighty, fleshy needs, its ideologies and rules of living, as opposed to the spectral rot of existence, or the joy of possibility, thinking of Kouoh, is to feel, to love, and to respect Kouoh.

What imbued Kouoh with so much strength and power?