Joburg Art Fair 2025: ALL AFRICA RE-UNION as Performative Reclamation

One of the most compelling highlights of the 2025 FNB Joburg Art Fair was ALL AFRICA RE-UNION, conceptualized and curated by Thebe Ikalafeng, founder of Brand Africa, with Professor DLS Kwesi anchoring the project through his historical insight. This ambitious performance art piece, framed by a painting from Mark Modimola and brought to life by performers Aubrey Poo, Shoki Mmola, Napo Masheane, and an ensemble of others, was not only a striking display of artistic collaboration but also a profound intervention into Africa’s historical imagination.

Artwork by Mark Modimola and Photo by Tumelo Lerole and Trevor Stuurman.

At the heart of the performance was a radical reframing of the infamous 1884 Berlin Conference, the geopolitical crime that partitioned the African continent under colonial dominion. Ikalafeng’s staging replaces the colonial figures with nineteen luminaries of African descent, seated around twenty chairs. The roster includes Zulaikha Patel, Nelson Mandela, Sojourner Truth, Miriam Makeba, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Wangari Maathai, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Amílcar Cabral, Credo Mutwa, Thabo Mbeki, Muammar Gaddafi, Dambisa Moyo, Haile Selassie, Thebe Ikalafeng himself (shown presenting an upside-down map of Africa), Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Cheikh Anta Diop, and W.E.B. Du Bois.

The twentieth chair, empty and marked simply You At The Table, is perhaps the most powerful gesture. It insists that the audience, the everyday African, is part of the deliberation and bears responsibility for Africa’s present and future. This move collapses the distance between performer and spectator, transforming passive reception into active contemplation.

Photo by Tumelo Lerole and Trevor Stuurman.

Central to Ikalafeng’s vision is the call for Africans to liberate themselves from dependency on external validation and Western prescriptions. By inverting Berlin 1884, he compels the continent to look inward, to draw solutions from its own philosophies, leaders, and cultural reservoirs rather than continuing to defer to the very West that colonized and divided it. The iconography of an upside-down African map, held by Ikalafeng during the performance, pushes this critique further. It signifies a necessary reorientation of perspective, where Africa becomes the point of reference and not a margin defined by others.

In doing so, Ikalafeng extends a lineage of visionary African thought. His performance resonates with Julius Nyerere’s philosophy of Ujamaa, which located development in communal traditions rather than Western capitalism, and with Thabo Mbeki’s African Renaissance, which called for the reawakening of African pride and self-reliance. It also aligns with the enduring principle of “African solutions to African problems,” articulated by leaders from Haile Selassie to the African Union, yet here re-imagined through the cultural and symbolic power of art. By seating figures such as Amílcar Cabral, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Cheikh Anta Diop alongside contemporary voices like Zulaikha Patel and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ikalafeng constructs a genealogy of intellectual, political, and cultural resistance that transcends generations and geographies.

Performers in action. Photo by the author.

Mark Modimola’s painting provided a visual continuum to the performance, infusing the stage with motifs of memory, resilience, and futurity. The performers animated these ideas with a choreography of solemn dialogue, bursts of song, and theatrical interventions, embodying a spectrum of voices that ranged from ancestral wisdom to contemporary feminist critique.

In reclaiming Berlin 1884, ALL AFRICA RE-UNION operates on multiple registers. It is an act of historical restitution, an archive of African leadership across centuries, and a provocation to imagine futures untethered from colonial trauma. The inclusion of figures as diverse as Sojourner Truth, Dambisa Moyo, and Zulaikha Patel underscores that African agency is not bound by geography alone but extends across diasporas, generations, and disciplines.

Within the commercial and transactional environment of the Joburg Art Fair, this performance reasserted the enduring role of art as a site of intellectual contestation and societal transformation. Most importantly, it illuminated Ikalafeng’s visionary thinking: the conviction that Africa’s path forward lies not in mimicry of the West, but in the continent’s own capacity for self-definition, innovation, and unity.

ALL AFRICA RE-UNION ultimately stands as both living archive and manifesto: a performative gathering of the continent’s spirits, thinkers, and fighters, and a clarion call for all Africans, past, present, and future, to claim their seat at the table.

Chepape Makgato is an independent visual artist, freelance arts writer and curator. He is a Chief Curator at William Humphreys Art Gallery. He is a deputy chairperson of the South African Museums Association Central (Free State and Northern Cape). He serves on the panel of Acquisition Committee of ArtBank South Africa. He has a Master's Degree in Fine Art from University of Witwatersrand and is currently a PhD candidate in Art and Music at UNISA. He is a Research Fellow in Faculty of Humanities at Sol Plaatje University. He is 2026 Senior Artist Fellow of Leuphana Institute of Advance Studies at Leuphana University of Luneburg in Germany.