What is he actually doing at the Cheuka Harare Art Fair?

Mo Laudi, born Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape, spent two decades getting Afro-house, kwaito and gqom onto dancefloors in London and Paris. This month he's doing something adjacent but different: deciding who gets a platform, not just what gets played. Mo Laudi is co-curating the second edition of the Cheuka Harare Art Fair (CHAF), running November 17 to 19 at East End Hall on the Harare Showgrounds, after South African artist Kemang Wa Lehulere invited him onto the project.

CHAF's sophomore edition is a deliberate pivot away from the conventional gallery-booth format and toward Artist Run Initiatives, collectives and residencies from across Southern Africa and the wider continent, timed to overlap with CIMAM's first-ever African conference at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. Through the curatorial process, Mo Laudi has built working relationships with Zimbabwean artists Wallen Mapondera, Portia Zvavahera and Moffat Takadiwa, names that rarely appear next to a house DJ's credits.

Why remix a 90-year-old field song for a Burkinabé project?

He's still making records in between. The Franco-Burkinabé project Kananayé, built around a French vocalist and musicians rooted in the Mossi warba rhythms of Bobo-Dioulasso, invited him to remix "Sea Lion Woman," a work song recorded in Mississippi in 1939 and carried into the canon decades later by Nina Simone. His version, "Sea Lion Woman, Mo Laudi Touch," came out as the lead single ahead of the full four-track Kananayé Remix EP, which also features reworks by Kayrop, Murphy Cubic and RMBO. It folds Afro-house and 3-step rhythm under the original vocal. Mo Laudi says he wanted the result "sensual, joyful and powerful, music that moves your body while connecting you to history."

"Sensual, joyful and powerful, music that moves your body while connecting you to history."

What's the throughline between a remix and a curatorial seat?

To Mo Laudi, they're the same move. His long-running position is that African artists should be free to work across Afro-house, kwaito, gqom and visual or curatorial practice rather than being flattened into one export-friendly genre tag, and that the institutions around that work, labels, galleries, fairs, should answer to the artists themselves rather than to whoever happens to be willing to book them. A remix of an African-American standard and a co-curator credit at a Zimbabwean art fair read as two separate careers on paper. For him they're one argument made twice.