Conversations of a Lifetime

Penny Siopis, My Lovely Day, 1997. Spliced sequences of 8mm home movies shot by the artist's mother in 1950s and 1960s South Africa, with sound and visual text. Installation view at Second Johannesburg Biennale, Trade Routes: History and Geography, 1997. Courtesy and © Penny Siopis

It was 1996, and Okwui had set up a temporary home in Johannesburg as the artistic director of the city's second biennale.

Two years had passed since the country's first democratic election. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission had begun. There could not have been a more extraordinary place to be than the "new" South Africa, now embraced by the continent and the world as never before.

On a visit to Cape Town, Okwui took a trip to Cape Point, later recalling:

I was astonished by the experience of standing there, where the two oceans met. I knew at that very moment this would be my concept: the meeting of worlds. Like the deeply conflicted story of South Africa's historical origin, the exhibition was to be called Trade Routes. It was bubbling in my mind—I couldn't wait to get back to the hotel to write it down. I wanted to make an exhibition that took globalization as its point of departure, to argue that globalization actually started here, in South Africa.¹

Back in Johannesburg, he wasted no time initiating conversations with the art community; he needed to know everything. He had been primed a little by reading the art criticism of my partner, Colin Richards, and called him up for a chat. Soon after, he invited Colin to be part of his curatorial team for the biennale.

Conversations with Okwui were always an event. Some events last a lifetime.

So it was for Colin, as it was for me. Around the same time, I was invited to be part of Okwui's exhibition Alternating Currents, which he curated with Octavio Zaya for the Second Johannesburg Biennale. We were all in this together.

If Colin were alive today he would be writing now, reflecting on Okwui's brilliance and how he changed the art world. He would be describing the nature of their conversations—intense and spirited, argumentative and agreeable. Inspired. Respectful. He would stress how these conversations continued long after the biennale, with Okwui inviting him to contribute to international conferences and publications and, so, join a like-minded circle across the globe: individuals who shared the commitment to challenge dominant narratives and the ways of the West. He would be recounting their shared ambition to make space for other voices and ways of making and being.

Colin would say that Okwui's extraordinary achievements were not bonded by his critical prowess alone or his aspirational ethos but by his capacity for friendship, his "African way," as some might say, or what Okwui articulated in philosophical terms as hospitality. He might mention Okwui's appreciation of his writing on "critical humanism," which Colin argued had a special life in Africa and was working to advance. Informed by Edward Said's reflections on humanism and democratic criticism, it connected African thinkers to the words of Steve Biko and those of local writers. A relooking at the philosophy of ubuntu—a person is a person through other people—the often maligned, clichéd, and readily corrupted notion considered central to the self-understanding of post-apartheid South Africa. An "age-old African term for humanness," as artist David Nthubu Koloane described it, ubuntu is an ethics "incorporating the values of caring, sharing and being in harmony with all creation."²

In December 2012, Colin died. Okwui wrote me a condolence letter, noting that Colin was "the rarest of intellectuals." He continued:

We have all lost our brilliant intellectual shining star. Colin was not only important for South African letters, he was a true African scholar, engaged and committed. … Amongst the Igbos we will say that a mighty tree has fallen in the forest and the earth is shaking. Colin's recent writings on humanism have been particularly important to me. May Colin's memory never...