‘I’m here to serve first and foremost the continent of Africa and its diaspora,’ the director of Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town told the Financial Times, defining Africa in the broadest possible terms. ‘I like to make the joke that America is just another African country, that Brazil is just another.’ In doing so Kouoh has taken the institution well beyond the private collection of philanthropist Jochen Zeitz it was set up in 2017 to highlight, bringing in a changing advisory group that this year includes artists Carsten Höller and Oscar Murillo, and staging the landmark When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, a sprawling survey of 150 artists that tours to Kunstmuseum Basel in 2024. Having founded RAW Material Company in Dakar, the curator is familiar with what it takes to cultivate an active, discursive scene, establishing a pan-African curatorial fellowship programme at Zeitz – which aims to ‘contribute towards a redefinition of curatorial practice and art history scholar- ship’ – the 2023 cohort ranging from a Mozambican architect to a Namibian anthropologist.