A Letter to Okwui

October 2020

Dear Okwui,

Remember that time when you were told you weren't truly African?

I remember being so excited to have been invited to present at a conference where you'd also be presenting. Indeed, it was a primary reason why I'd accepted the invitation—just to see you speak.

The day of, you'd just given an inspired talk on Wangechi Mutu's montage aesthetic, and I had hip-hop on the brain. Then a man gets up during the Q&A—African American, senior in age, all decked out in a kente crown and daishiki—and stated that he was surprised that "as an African brother" you did not relay the "true African spirit" in Mutu's work.

I mean, the whole thing was laughable. I'd long known the type: he was my uncles, my neighbors, my pastors, and the cats who used to play chess in the park near my house. He was among the brothers and elders who truly cared for their community and truly cared for the acquisition of knowledge, because knowledge and truth are the only paths toward liberation but who also thought truth and knowledge ultimately flowed through them. You were gracious enough not to laugh. Your answer was a nice, long, pregnant pause, followed by you listing the several canonical European and American works that were part of your African education; then you moved on to the next speaker.

What could a Black American man teach you about "true" Africanity? Why do I suspect it wasn't the first time you'd faced such criticism? I know that we in the West had a hard time marrying the ideas of "Africa" and "contemporaneity," but that moment made it perfectly clear that even many educated Black folks in America held on to some utopian, prelapsarian idea of an African Motherland—a place where everyone was royalty and where indigenous spirituality bound the community together in egalitarian serenity. After all, we needed a homeland to go back to. We still need an escape hatch.

You didn't stay for the conference's celebration dinner that evening.

There you were, African and contemporary, choosing as your calling to champion the work of contemporary African artists. You even focused on photography, for God's sake. It's a medium that is synonymous with technological prowess. Not ritual objects, not masks, not amulets—not that there is anything problematic with those things. It's just that a whole lot of folks failed to look at the breadth of what African artists had been doing in the twentieth century. You had a cohort of bad-ass Africans working the academic, funding, and museum institutions with you: Chika, Salah, Bisi … especially Bisi, whose equally premature death, so close to your own, I will always think of as a twin tragedy.¹

But you also knew that the man who challenged your "Africaness" was also your potential ally. And why not? He got to this land now called the Americas because of the genocidal triangle trade, and your homeland was equally violated by that trade and colonial incursions. There was a chasm between your lives—years of history, years of knowledge, years of unknowing, and an entire ocean between—but he didn't want one. Even if he invented an imaginary Africa, he definitely wanted to counter the real effects of all that trauma. In the end, that's what you both wanted. You wanted anticolonial work to thrive all over the globe, not just across the African continent or just in the States. You saw the global reach—even the global necessity—of the project, even if colonialism violated us in differing ways. You got me to check myself: to realize the moments when I—a spiritual child of pan-Africanism—start drifting into romantic notions of Black and Brown coalitions. How can I train myself to think holistically about Black cultural production around the world and simultaneously hold on to important cultural and historical distinctions? How can I first decolonize my mind?

As I am sitting here writing this letter, I am wondering what...