Behind a hidden door, the riches of west African art

Jack Denton, The Times

Rooms in the centre of Nairobi hold artefacts gathered from Mali, the Gambia, Togo and Benin. Pieces bought locally for £150 can fetch up to £2,000 in Britain

p an unmarked set of stairs in Nairobi’s chaotic central business district, where few tourists dare to venture, are two storeys of rooms packed with art and other treasures from west and central Africa.

Spiritual masks up to a metre tall sit beside Yoruba beaded thrones and patterned “mud blankets” from Mali, some of which are destined for shop floors in London or elsewhere in the West.

Men from the other side of the continent eat and pray together as they ply their trade from individual storeroom warrens, sleeping on beds tucked into corners, surrounded by art worth thousands of pounds stacked to the ceiling.

“This is a very special place,” said a trader from the Gambia who, like the others, wanted anonymity because of scrutiny over the legal status of the sellers and their business.

These storerooms are one stop in a supply chain that brings art from across Africa to the West, and a reminder of Nairobi’s legacy as a hub for collectors seeking works from the continent’s hard-to-reach corners.

Nairobi has been a centre of the African art world since at least the Seventies, when the American collector Alan Donovan co-founded African Heritage, considered the continent’s first pan-African art gallery.

Donovan, who died in 2021, spent decades travelling across Africa with foreign currency provided by the Central Bank of Kenya, buying goods sold in Nairobi and 50 outlets around the world. When he stopped his circuits of Africa in the Nineties, west African traders came to him, packing studio apartments in the city centre.

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Francis Mbugua, a Kenyan collector and shopkeeper in Nairobi’s City Market, said the country’s historic stability and global links had helped to establish it as an art hub that lasts today.

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