The partnership behind the museum was an unlikely one. German businessman Jochen Zeitz, the former CEO of Puma, had spent years assembling what became one of the world's most significant collections of contemporary African art. The V&A Waterfront, owned by Growthpoint Properties and the Government Employees Pension Fund, invested more than R500 million in construction and infrastructure. Zeitz loaned his collection for his lifetime. Heatherwick Studio's challenge was to create gallery spaces from a structure never designed to hold anything but loose grain. Using a variety of concrete-cutting techniques, the team carved out galleries from the densely packed cylinders, creating a large central atrium and multiple exhibition halls. The remaining concrete shafts were capped with strengthened glass, producing what observers have called a cathedral-like interior. Above the museum, the upper portion of the silo complex became The Silo Hotel, which opened its doors in March 2017, its billowing glass windows looking out toward Table Mountain.

From its inaugural exhibition, Zeitz MOCAA declared its intent to challenge what a museum on the African continent could be. "All Things Being Equal," curated by founding director Mark Coetzee, took its title from a text work by Hank Willis Thomas and presented 41 artists including El Anatsui, William Kentridge, Zanele Muholi, and Kehinde Wiley. The question it posed was direct: "How will I be represented in the museum?" Subsequent exhibitions deepened that inquiry. "Five Bhobh: Painting at the End of an Era" brought 29 Zimbabwean artists together in the wake of Robert Mugabe's resignation, exploring themes of land, memory, and struggle through seven thematic sections. Hyperallergic ranked it first among their top 15 exhibitions worldwide in 2019. South African artist Senzeni Marasela's solo show, "Waiting for Gebane," centered Black women's experiences through photography, textiles, and embroidery, using the colour red to signify feminist histories.

Cape Town is a city where access to cultural institutions is shaped by deep economic and geographic disparities, legacies of apartheid-era spatial planning that persist decades after democracy. Zeitz MOCAA has tried to address this directly. Its Centre for Arts Education developed MOCAA On The Move, sending art educators to schools and community centres across the city. An after-school programme with the nonprofit Lalela provides weekly art classes in the museum's classrooms during the hours when children are most vulnerable. The museum also partnered with the University of the Western Cape for a Museum Fellowship Programme, selecting emerging curators, researchers, and artists from across the continent. Perhaps most remarkably, the 2020 exhibition "Home Is Where the Art Is" invited the people of Cape Town to submit art for display -- nearly 2,000 works arrived, from children's drawings to masterworks from private collections, installed salon-style and described as a love letter to the city.

The Ocular Lounge on level six offers 270-degree views of Cape Town -- Table Mountain filling one window, the harbour and Atlantic Ocean filling the others. It is a fitting vantage point for a museum that has tried to reframe how an entire continent sees its own creative output. The building itself has become an icon, its honeycombed silhouette now as recognizable on the Cape Town skyline as the mountain behind it. But the most important transformation may be the one happening inside the galleries, where artists from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Madagascar, and the diaspora are shown not as curiosities or emerging voices but as central participants in the global conversation about what art is and what it can do. Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian-born curator who served as Executive Director and Chief Curator from 2019 until her passing in May 2025, pushed the museum toward an ever more rigorous engagement with the continent's artistic production, leaving a legacy that continues to shape its direction.