The Africa Center’s New Leader Focuses on Connection

The Africa Center in New York has named a new leader, Martin Kimani, a former Kenyan diplomat with a multidisciplinary background who embodies the wide spectrum of offerings the institution is embracing as it expands its audience.

Kimani, 53, a former permanent representative of Kenya to the United Nations who also held other government positions in Kenya, started as the organization’s new leader on Jan. 21. His appointment comes nine months after Uzodinma Iweala, chief executive of the center, announced he was stepping down after seven years.

Kimani, who is Kenyan with American residency, has a background in security — he served as Kenya’s special envoy for countering violent extremism, for instance — and has experience working in political risk analysis, and bond and currency sales. His background is a departure from the Center’s past leaders who worked in the arts and humanities.

But Kimani said his previous work positions him to build on the diverse programming the Africa Center has embraced that goes beyond art exhibitions to include lectures on geopolitics, author readings and visits from sitting African presidents.

“By the time Uzo took over, there was a lot of frustration about where the Center was heading, and things that have not worked out,” Kimani said in a recent interview, discussing the former director and the era that preceded him. “He has fought that and brought it to a more vibrant phase. I want to build on what he’s done.”

The Center, in Harlem, went through years of stumbles and transitions as it changed locations and transformed from an art museum to an institution that is more broadly focused on building connections among Africa’s diaspora community.

Kimani said he plans to keep that focus but also to build connections with residents of the neighborhood.

“We should be not just having people flying in from all over the world to the Africa Center, but making Harlem and the immediate neighborhood feel like there’s something serving them right next door,” he said.

Kimani also plans an initiative to reach the significant slice of the city’s migrants who have arrived from Mauritania, Senegal, Angola, Guinea and elsewhere in Africa.

He said he envisions “a place where we can have a complex, possibly painful but really necessary conversation between people of African descent and recent African migrants.”

“There needs to be a real connection,” he said. “We’re looking at each other across the gulf. The solidarity is not where it should be.”

Kimani holds a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. in war studies from King’s College London and a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from the University of New Hampshire.

He most recently served as executive director of New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. He has lived in New York since 2020, in addition to a stint on Wall Street during the mid-1990s.

“I discovered there were many things I could be good at, but making money wasn’t one of them,” he said with a laugh.

Raising money will be a part of Kimani’s new job. The Africa Center has received significant funding from the city over the years but still needs $4.25 million to help pay for its construction plans. It occupies only about 20 percent of some 70,000 square feet of the space allotted for it in a tower at the top of Museum Mile designed by Robert A.M. Stern. (The building also includes 17 floors of luxury condos.)

“I want to try and go beyond the big-money philanthropy to find more modest contributions,” he said. “And that has to be on the back of programming. That’s what makes people believe and feel. If we get the programming right, I think we’ll have an easier time generating more fund-raising.”