In August 2026, history was quietly, brilliantly rewritten in South Africa’s cultural capital. When the prestigious FNB Art Prize named Kelebogile Marope its 2026 winner, it marked a monumental watershed moment: Marope had become the first artist from Botswana to ever claim the acclaimed award.
The accolade – part of the Joburg Art Fair – was simply the latest milestone in a lifelong journey defined by quiet observation, relentless grit, raw personal grief, and the profound act of digging up forgotten histories through ordinary household objects.
‘There was an artist in me before I even knew the title of artist,’ Marope reflects. ‘Observation is one of the first tools in an artist’s bag. As a child, I observed and listened a lot. I was quiet, so I would just go off on my own. If not listening to my thoughts, I would be listening to the world around me.’
Her origins were rooted not in formal galleries, but in the solitude of a sensitive mind trying to make sense of her surroundings. Her father, a man possessed by an insatiable curiosity, laid the intellectual groundwork for her creative life. ‘My dad wasn’t necessarily an artist, but he had a research mind. He would get lost in reading,’ she recalls fondly. ‘I was not surprised that what he gave me when I was preparing to go to boarding school in Kimberly was a copy of Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom.’
That spirit of inquiry shaped her interior life. ‘I was always trying to answer questions like: What are you seeing? What are you feeling… is there something specific? I answer those questions before I start working. They have stayed with me for a long time. There are specific incidents I remember because of these questions.’
Marope’s path to the visual art was far from straightforward; it was an accident born of illness, strict music lessons, and a chaotic, paint-splattered room.
At the girls’ boarding school she had been shipped to, she was a self-described introvert, seeking refuge in the library. Students were required to choose between music and visual art. She went with music. She possessed an instinctive, natural ear for the piano, but struggled immensely with reading sheet music under the stern gaze of a demanding teacher.
Then came the twist of fate.
‘There were three of us in the music class,’ Marope recalls. ‘One day the teacher got sick and said, ‘Go to the art class.’ The music room was a small space, and well-kept. The moment I walked into the art space, it was a mess-with lots of colour and a lot of students. It was a shock. Music worked with only two colours-black and white. But in the art room, there was so much colour. The tables were splattered. And everyone was laughing, having a great time.’
The art teacher handed her a piece of paper and a drawing utensil. By the end of the period, he stared at her work in disbelief.
‘Why are you not doing art?’ he demanded, before looking her in the eye. ‘You should consider doing art.’
It was a transformative crossroads. Driven by a sudden, consuming clarity, Marope lobbied the school authorities, speaking with counsellors and even the Principal to switch streams. Her request was granted for the start of her second year.
‘I wasn’t stressed at music, but art was different,’ she says. ‘I loved music, but I was struggling. When I got into the art world, I was lost in it-from its history to different forms of art styles over the ages, and the names that defined each art movement. The art teacher was romantic about art. I was gone; totally hooked. I didn’t need to be convinced that this was for me. I already knew I wanted to become an artist.’
Yet her trial was far from over. At the end of Grade 9, amidst systemic academic pressures, she failed art. Dismally. Entering Grade 10, she was dropped from the art curriculum entirely.
Drawn into a deep bout of teenage depression, she refused to let her passion wither. While other students completed their standard homework, Marope poured her soul into scrapbooks filled with sketches, clippings, and musings.
One day, a second teacher noticed her obsessive scraping and sketching. He asked her the exact same question as the first: ‘Why are you not doing art?’
When she explained that she had failed out, the faculty arranged a special, high-stakes makeup test. She was the only student in the room. ‘I wasn’t sleeping and I was feeling sick,’ she remembers. But when she turned in her work, the teacher delivered the news: ‘You passed. Do you want to do art?’
Because she was starting the curriculum late in Grade 11, school authorities – skeptical of a struggling Black student taking on an extra burden – doubted she could catch up. In those systems, only high-achieving ‘A-students’ were permitted to carry seven or eight subjects. By her own admission, she was not an A-student.
‘They were worried that I wouldn’t be able to catch up,’ Marope says, before dropping the irony: ‘It became the only subject that I ever got a prize for. By Grade 12, I got the prize again. I didn’t have to tell anybody that I wanted to become an artist. It just happened.’
That seventh subject proved to be her ultimate salvation. ‘I struggled in school, but when I found art, even the other subjects kind of became easier. I passed well to be admitted to Rhodes University because of the seven subjects. If I had done only six, I don’t think I would have gotten enough points.’
She still holds immense gratitude for those educators who saw past the transcript. ‘I always remember those two teachers. I talk a lot about them because of the power of the teacher. I probably would have found a long way here, but they made it shorter.’
Having conquered high school, Marope faced an immediate standoff at home. She took a gap year, throwing her household into tension. Her parents, terrified of the notorious financial instability facing artists, begged her to pursue a practical career like Social Work.
‘English and History were my strongest subjects. I was confused, but I was hearing them out,’ she says. ‘They asked, ‘How are you going to survive? You’re going to struggle.’ They took the liberty to apply for various programmes on my behalf, and I was admitted for different programmes, but I said no. There were arguments. We had fights. I was crying a lot, but crying over a passion to parents doesn’t mean anything.’
It was her father who ultimately relented, unable to bear her quiet heartbreak. ‘I can’t stand seeing you like this,’ he told her. He helped her assemble her portfolio and submit applications to top-tier South African universities: University of Cape Town, Wits, and Rhodes.
When Rhodes accepted her first, father and daughter boarded an Intercape bus bound for Port Elizabeth, taking a shuttle into the historic, imposing town of Grahamstown (now Makhanda).
‘You get to Grahamstown; there are British buildings everywhere and they are old. You see it as a little museum-a small town with 50 churches. It felt like a heavy space,’ Marope reflects. ‘It was a small town and divorced from other towns. During holidays, the town dies. But it was very rich in terms of the art. The Grahamstown Arts Festival was feverish with all art forms, with people from all over the world.’
The fine art programme at Rhodes was notoriously unyielding – a baptism by fire designed to break fragile egos.
‘There is no pampering in art schools,’ Marope emphasises. ‘That comes up even in critique sessions. They tear your work apart while they are swearing. There was a specific spot where people would always be found crying at.’
Did she ever end at that spot?
‘Of course,’ she laughs candidly.
The work was relentless. ‘At 5:00 am you would be going to the studio, and you’d realise that you are not alone; someone is practising on the piano in the music lab. It’s an ecosystem where you are feeding into each other without even realising it. I didn’t have a fallback. No matter how hard it was, I knew I had to climb the mountain.’
Part of that climb involved confronting uncomfortable socio-political dynamics within classical training. ‘You do life drawing, and the model is a naked woman. It was always a Black woman. You could tell that she was already a grandmother-obviously, she needed the money. Life drawing is the basis of art; it’s the best study ground for any art form. You observe posture, perspective, and the proportion of the body. The male models would be in underwear and the women would always be naked. We started to complain about it. It was hard for 18, 19, 20-year-olds to be comfortable in that space. I was certainly uncomfortable, but I said, ‘You have to learn,’ and I got comfortable after a while.’
The attrition was ruthless. A starting cohort of 50 students plummeted to barely 25 by their second year. ‘Some had failed, while others couldn’t stand the criticism from our teachers. A lot of people who left were better than me.’
By the end of their undergraduate studies, only two students in her class elected to pursue post-graduate degrees in fine art: Marope was one of them.
During her third year, Marope discovered her true artistic calling: conceptual installations and sculpture. ‘Sculpture is amateur engineering,’ she explains. ‘We learn about mass, how to deal with and work around structures. Of course, there are some things we don’t know, but it doesn’t mean we can’t engage with three-dimensional objects.’
However, as she completed her Master’s degree, her supervisors gave her a dire, prophetic warning: Be careful of post-school depression.
When she returned home to Botswana, the transition was jarring. She was entering a space far removed from the intense intellectual incubator of Rhodes. That same year, Nelson Mandela died, casting a heavy pall over the region.
‘It was the first time I was really home since I left as a teenager,’ she says. ‘I’m out of community, out of friends. There is no one to talk to about art. Nothing at home was familiar. I couldn’t even bring myself to cook; my dad cooked for me.’
Desperate to break out of her isolation, she began searching for local artistic communities. She had never been to the Thapong Visual Arts Centre, but a call for artists pulled her out of the shadows: a commission to create a massive monument from stockpiled ivory tusks – the iconic elephant sculpture, now standing proudly at Sir Seretse Khama International Airport.
‘It just so happened that one of my favourite animals is the elephant. One of the first stuffed animals that Dad bought for me was an elephant,’ she says.
She submitted her portfolio and CV, securing her place as the only female artist on the project team.
Working on the sculpture was a gruelling, deeply emotional experience that reconnected her with the core principles of conceptual art.
‘In school, they teach us about found objects. Working on the sculpture brought back what I learned. You see piles and piles and piles of tusks like you are at a graveyard. You see it inscribed on the tusk where it came from. You think of the inevitability of death. You are thinking through things in a deeper way.
‘Doing the elephant sculpture gave me life. Whenever I look at that elephant sculpture, I think to myself, ‘Don’t give up.’ It gave our airport status and a landmark. People are always taking pictures with it on the background. So, I say to myself, ‘Don’t give up; there is potential.”
After the success of the sculpture, Marope stumbled into teaching, spending three years as the sole art teacher at a school in Jeffreys Bay, South Africa. Standing in front of Grade 8 to 12 students, she found herself channelling the very teachers who had saved her years earlier.
Then, in April 2020, she returned to Botswana for what she thought would be a short holiday. Days later, the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe, closing borders and locking down nations.
Marope was trapped in Botswana. Though she initially taught her South African students online, the school eventually let her go. Not only did she lose her job, but missed her students’ final exhibitions, and was even unable to attend their graduation dance. ‘It hurt deeply,’ she says quietly. ‘I didn’t realise it at the time, but the clock had started ticking.’
The following year brought a devastating blow: her beloved father, her fiercest champion and intellectual anchor, contracted COVID-19 and passed away.
Marope started looking closely at the domestic world her father had left behind. In her grief, she began examining the physical objects scattered around her family’s home-the irons, the tools, the furniture, the worn heirlooms.
It was out of this that her award-winning body of work was born: Archaeologies of Use.
‘Archaeologies of Use is the unearthing of a lived experience,’ Marope explains. ‘It’s all around the idea of the home in different ways. Found objects around the home tell you stories you didn’t know. Objects we live with almost become silent witnesses of our lives.’
She recounts a poignant revelation during her research: ‘My mom once said to me, ‘You know, I have never ironed for your father because he always ironed his own clothes.’ My grandfather apparently also ironed. Now, being invited into a silent narrative because I dug deep into my father’s hobby, I saw a glimpse of a story I wasn’t told about my own family. You can dig up your own story through objects around the home and asking questions about them. Household objects around us carry more than function-they tell stories. They are part of our oral history.’
Winning the 2026 FNB Art Prize is not merely a personal triumph for Marope; it is a momentous milestone for Botswana’s contemporary art scene, which she believes urgently needs infrastructure and institutional support.
‘In Botswana we still need to develop a full-fledged art ecosystem,’ she states. ‘It is very hard to survive without that ecosystem. We have people carrying out multiple responsibilities, and that questions our quality control. In a developed ecosystem, you have artists, curators, critics, and people whose job is just to frame your work and go home.’
Now, as the laureate, Marope is preparing for her grandest challenge yet: a solo exhibition at next year’s Johannesburg Art Fair. It will be her very first solo exhibition since the one she had at the end of her Master’s programme years ago.
‘You need a lot of resources to pull it off successfully,’ she acknowledges. ‘Yes, it’s called a solo exhibition, but there is a lot involved. You need a community of support.’
Currently in the research phase, Marope is ordering texts, taking meticulous field notes, and sketching initial concepts-all anchored in the domestic sphere. ‘The body of work will definitely be around household objects,’ she promises.