Katherine El-Salahi, the activist, anthropologist and publisher, has died.
Born Katherine Levine, she studied social anthropology at Cambridge followed by a PhD at SOAS with fieldwork linked to the University of Dar es Salaam. On her return to London in 1970 she joined London Recruits, a clandestine group committed to fighting South African apartheid by radical means. El-Salahi initially travelled to the country to carry out leaflet bomb propaganda exercises, but then later facilitated safe houses for MK fighters from front-line states as well as, by posing alongside a fellow agent as a honeymooning couple, running guns and ammunition up to the South African border.
El-Salahi was instrumental in the career of her husband, the Sudanese painter Ibrahim El-Salahi. As the driving force behind his 2013 Tate Modern retrospective, Katherine was determined that the artist was not solely recognised within African art history, but as a pioneer of wider modernism. Acting as an expanded studio manager, she built close relationships with galleries, curators and museums on behalf of her husband, assembled an archive of his work dating back to his student years at the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1950s and secured professional representation with Vigo Gallery. Its director, Toby Clarke, observed ‘Katherine was an important if largely unknown figure in the history of African and Arab art.’
In the 1970s she was a founding editor of the Review of African Political Economy and in 1977 moved to Qatar where Ibrahim was working for the Ministry of Information. He had been forced to move to Emirates from his native Sudan having been imprisoned for six months without trial under the one-party government on Gaafar Nimeiry.
In the 1990s Katherine ran the Bellagio Publishing Network, a coalition dedicated to promoting books from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.
Read next Mark Rappolt meets Ibrahim El-Salahi
