Simon Njami is a Paris-based independent curator, lecturer, art critic, and novelist. He was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Revue Noire, a journal of contemporary African and extra-occidental art, and served as artistic director of the Bamako Encounters – African Biennale of Photography from 2001–7 and Dak’Art 2016/2018. His books include biographies of James Baldwin and Leopold Sédar Senghor as well as four novels.

Njami’s talk departs from John Foster Dulles, US Secretary of State between 1953 and 1959, and namesake of the street where HKW’s building, which originally opened as the Kongresshalle (congress hall) in 1957, is located. Moving on to 1989, when the institution of HKW was conceived, he touches upon seemingly marginal phenomena that impact world history: the so-called butterfly effect. Picking up the core of the institution’s name, ‘World Cultures’, he addresses notions of Otherness, the response to such stances by Africa and its cultural institutions, and finally deals with ‘end of history’ ideologies and the current debate on the restitution of cultural property stolen from the African continent under colonialism.