African art is one of humanity’s oldest languages. From San rock paintings in Southern Africa to the terracotta figures of the Nok culture in Nigeria, it has always transcended the decorative. It has expressed the sacred, legitimised power and preserved memory.
In the medieval kingdoms of Ife and Benin, bronze heads and ivory carvings captured the essence of cosmology and kingship, while the stone cities of Great Zimbabwe conveyed a sense of order and belief. Art was never marginal: it was at the heart of society.
Colonialism fractured this continuity. African works were stripped from context, shipped to Europe and classified as “ethnographic” while feeding the innovations of modernism. Picasso’s cubism, Matisse’s colour and Modigliani’s forms are unthinkable without African masks and sculpture. Yet the artists remained unnamed.
Independence movements in the 20th century gave rise to a modern African idiom. Figures such as Gerard Sekoto, Ernest Mancoba and Ben Enwonwu blended modernist training with African realities. In SA protest art stood against apartheid, proving that art could be both weapon and witness.
Today African art is global and local, traditional and experimental. El Anatsui’s dazzling bottle-top tapestries, Zanele Muholi’s striking self-portraits, William Kentridge’s animated allegories. All reflect a layered, restless and hybrid world. As James Baldwin put it: “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.”
The commercial fair dilemma
Which brings us to Johannesburg. By the time you read this the FNB Art Joburg 2025 Fair will have come and gone. It is the continent’s leading art fair, a showcase of African and diasporic creativity.
— SA art’s power lies in its complexity, not its conformity.
This year it offered no unifying curatorial theme. Instead, it aimed to be a platform for artists and galleries to engage in critical discourse. Yet the fair raises the same dilemma facing every commercial art stage: when money, banks and sponsors dictate the framework, how much room is left for art’s real work — to unsettle, to provoke, to reveal?
The landscape is shifting. SA art is too often reduced to shorthand about race and identity. This flips the colonial playbook without discarding it: once frozen in a “tribal” past, art is now mired in a quasi-political present. But SA art is more complex. It is abstraction and myth, memory and form, religious iconography and digital media. There are artists whose creations don’t overtly scream “African”, yet they are undeniably woven into the cultural tapestry.
The pressure to conform
Susan Sontag reminded us that “real art has the capacity to make us nervous”. In contrast, art fairs often prioritise comfort over challenge. The reason is structural. Galleries gravitate to what sells, leaving little room for experiment. Collectors want work they can “get” instantly, that matches their ethos and interiors. Artists feel the pressure to repeat themselves, to align with trends, to self-commodify. Fairs replicate this loop. Art becomes Coca-Cola — sweet, safe, predictable, consumed and forgotten.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. FNB Art Joburg has, for 17 years, built a commercial platform for African art. To remain relevant, it must also lead critically. Why not take a cue from the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition and broaden the invitation? Invite artists directly, outside the gallery system. Dig up the awkward, the unmarketable, the challenging. Let art catch us off guard.
SA art is both ancient and contemporary, indigenous and hybrid, local and global. Its power lies in its complexity, not its conformity. To honour that complexity requires curators and fairs to resist the straitjacket of branding and sociology, to embrace instead the messy, layered, unsettling vitality that has always defined art on this continent. Anything less risks reducing it to spectacle.
• Cachalia, a businessman and management consultant, is a former DA MP and public enterprises spokesperson.
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