Although I have spent only a week in Sao Paolo, I already have hundreds of reasons to love this city I feel deeply connected to. I love it for the insatiable, multicultural, healing energy that envelopes this Brazilian metropolis. I love it for its universal spirit, allowing you to be the best version of yourself; for its joyful and wise inhabitants, some of whom have genes from all continents, people who smile with their eyes, mind, soul, with their entire body; for its provocative, stylish, art-deco, neoclassical, brutalist buildings of an arrogant modernity or a borderless, fluid beauty that crosses land and sea. I love it for its cultural landscape which condenses influences from all over the world and for its mesmerizing chaos which, in certain moments of grace, turns into a chrysalis of music, dance and flavours.

But most of all, I love it for the incredible Pinacoteca, that synthesizes all of the above. This breath-taking villa, the oldest art museum in São Paulo. It now houses part of my African art collection, which left France and opened to the public for the first time. A whole string of ”firsts”. Because it is the first time Brazil has seen a collection of African weavings. Therefore, it is the first time that thousands of Brazilians have the opportunity to admire and connect with these objects. And they can continue to do so until February 2025… But what an inappropriate word “objects” is! All these creations, made by the hands of genius craftsmen, are charged with meaning and love. Both material and immaterial, entities with souls, bearers of ancestral energies. That is what thousands of visitors have felt or what the endless stream of people that continues to flow in will experience.

When you do something wholeheartedly, you are surrounded by a burst of emotion, diluted into subtle shades of melancholy, love and joy. Alegria, melancolia, amor. I don’t understand Portuguese; still, the visitors and I understood each other perfectly. The people who came there hugged me and thanked me. Many of them resonated intensely at the sight of the exhibits. A few cried. I cried too. Held for years in special boxes and cabinets, folded and carefully protected in silk papers, the fabrics came to life. To see all these sublime fabrics, in their entirety, fully unfolded, in all their splendour, like peacocks unfurling their feathers at full wingspan, rendered me a state of imponderability. Like flowers that bloom rarely, once every decade.

Soul to soul, this is how we all shared the love of art and Africa in this exceptional São Paolo Pinacoteca. Incredible geometries encapsulated in shades of blue and ochre brought to the surface some “memories” deeply hidden in their genealogy, in their ancestors’ past. All this under the wise gaze of the elephant masks, a council of the wise. An entire room was dedicated to these exceptional textile sculptures, the essence of the Bamileke soul, the ethnic group I belong to.

When I started collecting textiles, it looked more like a whim. Half a century ago, no one saw African fabrics as an art form. I started with my native Cameroon, went on to the rest of Africa and then to faraway lands such as India, Bhutan and Tibet, gathering various traditional objects, beads and textiles. As time passed, some journalists called me a visionary, for in my many travels, I amassed art that expresses all of Africa’s best and noblest. Little by little, a new passion was born: an extensive collection of one-of-a-kind exhibits from my travels. Each object – an invitation to discover our great civilization.

Many of the collected fabrics are shown here, in the museum: Melehfa, the Mauritanian veil, as light as the wind, synonymous with women’s identity, the mud-dyed Bogolan of the Bambara people from Mali, whose writings speak of the origins of the universe; the Ndop, reserved for Cameroonian chiefs, whose mystical designs are protected by raffia thread; the N`Tchackas and Kasai velvet with their irrepeatable geometries ; the sacred patterns of the Kente with its mesmerizing colours and many others. Also, you can admire beaded objects of the Yoruba culture, fringed crowns guarding the subjects from the force of their sovereign’s gaze.
But beyond the love of beauty and knowledge, another objective was to help perpetuate an ancestral tradition: the unknown work of the weavers, whom I consider the genuine creators. In my endeavours, I found the few craftsmen still working and invited them to restart their production, breathing new life into the national heritage.

This treasure, gathered with so much love and care, had long been hidden from the public eye. Now, it has hit the road and will stay for a while in Brazil, where several museums intend to present it to the public.