Africa’s art world has lost one of its most generous but controversial benefactors

When most teenagers might have spent their weekends playing sports or watching movies, Sindika Dokolo spent many of his at the home of a Belgian art collector. Accompanying his father, the young Dokolo would spend hours in what he’s described as “a kind of museum of curiosities with pre-Columbian and African works.”

Enthralled by these regular visits, Dokolo,  began collecting art at just 15 and never stopped till he died in a diving accident in Dubai at 48 on Thursday (Oct. 29).

Dokolo, who was born in Kinshasa, DR Congo to wealthy Congolese business man and a Danish mother, was perhaps best known in recent years as the husband of Isabel dos Santos, nominally Africa’s richest woman and the daughter of former Angola president José Eduardo dos Santos. For most of the 2010s they were the ultimate African power couple with lavish property in Europe and attended the most glamorous fashion and art events. On Instagram today, dos Santos talked of her family’s “enormous sadness and pain.”

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