Kaanye naawee, Nkoosi yaami!/ Kanye nawe, Nkosi yami!/ Mangi-hamb imihla yonke...
Sang Zanele Muholi. Loudly. Beautifully. Much to my shock.
Until earlier this week, I did not know this version of Zanele Muholi existed.
Like much of the world, I had known Muholi as a world-renowned, award-winning, photographer whose uncompromising images have reshaped how black queer lives are seen. Their singer side caught me off guard.
Kanye Nawe, a hymn known to generations of black South Africans raised in mainline churches, lends its name to Muholi's latest solo exhibition that opens at Southern Guild Cape Town on Saturday, 18 July 2026. The title serves as a reminder that long before art galleries, biennales and museums came pews, choirs and Sunday mornings.
Ironically, 22 years ago, in this very publication, Gail Smith chronicled how Muholi's work collided head-on with a funding organisation's Christian employee who rejected Muholi's funding application stating outright that: "I will not be associated with anything done against my Christian, natural and African beliefs and non-heterosexual promiscuous promotion of any sort is against God, Africa and nature. So, count me out!"
Back then Muholi's work was almost exclusively through the lens of lesbian activism. It was urgent, confrontational and necessary in a country where black queer existence was too often met with silence or violence.
Today, the mission is bigger. It is to appeal to human beings to be human. The vocabulary too has evolved. Muholi gently interrupted me every time I reached for the word "lesbian".
"LGBTQIA+, how do we express this acronym in our own languages? Perhaps, abantu bomlilo ofanayo [people who share the same fire]? We are dealing with more than gender here. We are talking about human beings. Who you sleep with and what organ touches which is irrelevant. Abantu babekade bethandana. People have always loved one another. Abantu bayathandana. As long as bengabulali muntu [they are not killing anyone] let people love one another," Muholi said.
For two decades Muholi has documented the lives society has preferred not to see; not because queer South Africans did not exist but because history repeatedly chose not to remember them.
Which is why Kanye Nawe, their latest exhibition, is such an apt title for Muholi's landmark homecoming exhibition. Loosely translated from isiZulu, Kanye Nawe means "with you, alongside you" or "walking together". When extended to the hymn they sung earlier it becomes "may I walk every day with You, my Lord".
When we met at Southern Guild's V&A Waterfront headquarters earlier this week, Muholi had just returned from Mexico City.
Before that came Rio de Janeiro, where Zanele Muholi: Beleza Valente (Brave Beauty) opened at the Museu de Arte do Rio on 12 June 2026, during Brazil's Pride Month.
In Mexico City, they joined Pride not merely as a guest but as part of a broader conversation around visual activism, education and community organising. Visual activism. Yes. That's the phrase I have been looking for. For Muholi. Muholi, today, can be described as a "visual activist". Their practice has become part anthropology, part memorial and part resistance art.
Kanye Nawe cannot be mistaken for a retrospective exhibition. Retrospectives usually look backwards. The exhibition insists on carrying people forward. Kanye Nawe is a major solo exhibition by Muholi. It marks the 20th anniversary of the artist's seminal portrait project Faces and Phases
"At the time I just knew I wanted to be seen. I didn't know I was becoming part of history. Now, to have my portrait in Faces and Phases and in a museum means the world to me. It means I can't be erased. It means some younger queer kid can find my face one day and know she looked like me. She made it," said Amanda Mapuma, featured 20 years ago in the Faces and Phases exhibition.
Mapuma's testimonial and others will be available in a special edition of the Muholi Art Institute (MA!) Times magazine that will be distributed during the exhibition opening.
Kanye Nawe spans more than two decades of Muholi's practice, bringing together landmark bodies of work including Faces and Phases, Only Half the Picture, Being, Mo(u)rning, Liza, ZaVa, the ongoing self-portrait series Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) and recent bronze sculptures which I had the opportunity to see in the making at the Bronze Age Art Foundry.
Whoever visits the exhibition must come armed with time and enough emotional fuel to make it to the end. You will leave a little heavier than you arrived. I have previewed some of the pieces.
More than two decades of photography, sculpture and film occupy every square metre of Southern Guild's Silo District gallery for the next two months.
Chronology, however, is almost immaterial. Kanye Nawe resists the neat arc of artistic progression. It chooses to confront a more urgent question: Who is afforded the dignity of remembrance? And who is written out of history?
The questions sit at the heart of everything Muholi has made. Muholi is by far one of the hardest interview subjects I have sat with: Precise in thought, unsentimental in delivery and uninterested in platitudes.
Their discipline is equally uncompromising. Most workdays begin at 3am and end by 9pm.
Yet beneath the rigour is an indescribable tenderness.
Our conversation shifted when we spoke about ubuntu: the radical insistence on caring for one another, on recognising another person's humanity as inseparable from your own. It is not an abstract philosophy for Muholi. The depth of the commitment is almost guilt-inducing. Even after decades of international acclaim and institutional recognition, Muholi remains unmoved by the idea of arrival. "There is still so much work to be done, mfowethu!"
"I deal with human beings and the stories behind them. Isililo, my latest black-and-white series, is not to beautify. I am not interested in beauty. I am dealing with real life situations. I deal with experiences that people are going through. Hence, I seem to feel like I am nowhere near the end, there is so much to be done! Mfowethu!"
One of the most cliché academic concepts of late has been the black archive. Everyone is talking about it or looking for it. To my simpleton mind, the Cabralian adage that "people are not fighting for ideas... they are fighting for material benefits" has always rung true. Yet, through Muholi's work, the black archive seems tangible and practical. We have been at it, just not aware of it.
"We were never taught about archives. An archive is an act of love and a refusal to let black lives disappear twice. First through violence. Second through forgetting."
For generations, black South Africans documented weddings, funerals, birthdays, baptisms and everyday life, yet countless family photographs have been discarded, buried or left to deteriorate because few recognised them as history or as something that could form part of the archive. If there is one thing one must take away from this article, it is that all images matter. What we viewed as hoarding, especially in years gone by, my grandmother comes to mind, was in fact unpronounced archiving. Through Muholi, I learnt that the archive is not merely about preservation. It is about power. It is about deciding whose stories are worthy of permanence.
"Art is a form of education. Through images we teach ourselves and others to see, to remember and to care. Every portrait, every sculpture carries a story that belongs to our collective history. This is how we build dignity and understanding for generations to come."
Lindeka Qampi, Muholi's longtime friend, collaborator and mentor of more than two decades, understands this perhaps better than anyone. The two have travelled together from township workshops to Pride marches in Mexico City and community engagements in Rio de Janeiro, bound by a shared belief that art belongs first to people before institutions. I will write about Qampi's story. Soon.
"There were photographers in our townships who documented entire communities. Many families don't realise the value of what that was. Those archives matter because they tell our history from our perspective. Find those photographers.
"They are not just "u-Cameraman!" they were the nearest we had to archivists. Find them! Find tat' uNkitha in KwaLanga! And many more," Qampi said.
Listening to Muholi and Qampi, one realises that the archive is less about nostalgia than inheritance.
I know many, in the art world, know Muholi's story. But I am tempted to rehash it. Backwards. From international acclaim to humble beginnings.
Before the museums. Before Venice. Before the Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, the Gropius Bau, the Smithsonian and other institutions collected or exhibited their work. Before becoming the first black queer African to receive the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography for 2026. There was Umlazi. There was Umbelebele High School in Q-Section. There was Market Photo Workshop.
There was a young person who wanted, improbably, to become a gynaecologist. Little did they know that, in the future, they would be producing monumental sculptures that speak directly to female reproductive systems; titled Ncinga, Bambatha, The Uterus and more.
Little did they know they would be bestowed some of the highest honours in the arts.
In 2017, France appointed Muholi a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters), one of France's highest cultural honours.
It is also not uncommon to hear people refer to Muholi as "Professor Sir Muholi". It comes with being knighted and holding an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège (Belgium) as well as Honorary Professorship in video and photography at the University of the Arts Bremen since 2013.
"Coming home this year feels profound. South Africa is marking the 70th anniversary of the 1956 Women's March, the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Soweto Uprising and just over 30 years of democracy.
"At the same time, I am celebrating 20 years of Faces and Phases and my own birthday this Sunday, 19 July, a day after the exhibition opens."
Muholi turns 54. There will be cake. There will be song and dance. There will be art.
Above all, there will be Kanye Nawe, at this Saturday's opening.
Muholi's latest exhibition will be on view at Southern Guild, Cape Town, until 10 September 2026.