Introduction: Healing, Solidarity, and the Calling of Art
Last spring in Nairobi, a cadre of thirty African artists from diverse disciplines convened for a conversation few gatherings in the art world allow: how to heal collectively from trauma, war, and genocide through culture. Titled The Power of Arts and Culture for Healing, the workshop was curated by Molemo Moiloa and Phumzile Nombuso Twala of Andani.Africa and organized with the support of the Quaker American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). The aim was straightforward yet ambitious: cultivate capacities among artists to carry the weight of history toward collective repair, using daily acts of creation, dialogue, and ritual as instruments of resilience.
Each morning opened with an invocation, setting a tone of vulnerability that allowed personal experiences to become shared knowledge. Through artist talks, musical performances, film screenings, a drum circle, and shared meals, participants moved from isolated challenges to a sense of close-knit solidarity. The gathering underscored a surprising truth: even within a market-driven art world, radical exchange—where art remains a site of healing and political possibility—continues to resonate.
Pan-African Roots, Contemporary Relevance
The event arrived in a moment of loss and reflection. News of Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh’s sudden death from cancer cast a heavy shadow, yet it also sharpened the frame for what Pan-African solidarity can and should mean today. Kouoh, who steered the Zeitz Museum in Cape Town and founded Raw Material Company in Dakar, had been slated to curate the 61st Venice Biennale (2026) under the theme In Minor Keys, a concept that positions artistic practice as both refuge and radical proposition. Her absence highlighted the costs—and the responsibilities—of cultural labor on Black practitioners across continents.
Connecting the Nairobi gathering to a longer history, the piece traces a lineage of Black Atlantic exchange. From Pearl Primus’ transcontinental journey in 1948—turning a Rosenwald Foundation grant into a path of movement across Africa—to the author’s own experiences with African dance repertoires such as Fanga Alafia, the piece argues that cultural transfer is a shared project, not a one-way gift. The result is a more living, more navigable map of Pan-African solidarity that travels across borders, generations, and disciplines.
The Politics of Healing and the Burden of Truth
Healing, in this frame, is not a retreat from politics. It is a disciplined practice of listening, documenting, and reimagining the future through a collective ethic. Theatre director Hope Azeda’s reflection on being named “Hope” and choosing to return to Rwanda to heal across generations illustrates how personal narratives become public acts of repair. The gathering echoed Felwine Sarr’s insistence that to heal we must first reinvent our relationship with the past and our ancestral knowledge, not merely chase a progressive timeline in search of “forward movement.”
Towards a New Pan-African Practice
What emerges from Nairobi is a revitalized form of global Pan-Africanism that favors intentional encounter over nostalgia. Initiatives like Loophole of Retreat, organized in 2022 with Simone Leigh at the Venice Biennale, and Deborah Willis’s Black Portraitures, are cited as living evidence of this renewed energy. The continent’s leaders—Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley among them—have spoken about sovereignty, interdependence, and climate justice as inseparable from cultural solidarity, underscoring how art can be a political act with practical outcomes.
Personal and Collective: Healing as Resistance
Participating as facilitator and witness, the author describes healing as both burden and surrender: a state of being that demands our attention to the interdependent web that sustains us. The gathering showed that healing is not an endpoint but a mode of resistance—an ongoing practice of creating spaces where the past can be acknowledged, and the future negotiated with care.
Looking Ahead: Minor Keys, Radical Futures
In Kouoh’s envisioned frame, the next Venice Biennale text and the broader Pan-African project will continue in “minor keys”—quiet, resilient registrations that offer refuge while proposing new configurations of power. The goal is not mere endurance but the courage to reframe canons, reimagine edges, and insist on solidarity across borders, languages, and generations. The Nairobi gathering affirms that our greatest strength lies in rebuilding a transnational conscience rooted in mutual obligation and shared healing.
