The Secondary Market for East African Painting
By The ArtCollect Desk · 10 August 2026 · 2 min read
East Africa effectively got its first real secondary-market auction for painting in November 2025 — here's what that one sale actually established, and what it hasn't yet.
A secondary market — a place where art already owned once gets resold, with public prices — is a different thing from a gallery selling new work. East African painting has had the second for decades. It's only just getting the first.
What launched in 2025
The Art Auction East Africa | Strauss & Co sale on 5 November 2025 was built specifically to be that secondary-market venue: consigned works, not new studio output, sold live and online from Circle Art Gallery in Nairobi. The organisers were explicit about scope — prioritising rare secondary-market paintings from the 1960s through the early 2000s from East Africa and the wider Indian Ocean region, alongside a smaller, curated selection of contemporary work. Around 65 lots from artists across roughly ten countries sold for a combined KES 29.6 million, with close to 80% of lots finding buyers.
What one sale actually proves
The top lot, K.F. Msangi's 1968 painting Baobab Under the Red Moon, sold for KES 3,522,000 — more than double its pre-sale estimate — alongside strong results for fellow Tanzanian modernist Sam Ntiro. That's a real, public, checkable resale price for historically significant East African modernist painting, which is precisely what a secondary market is supposed to produce and what this region didn't previously have on record at this scale.
What it doesn't yet prove
One sale is a starting point, not a track record. There's no multi-year price history yet to show whether a painting bought at this auction in 2025 would resell for more, less, or the same in five years — the second edition in October 2026 is the next data point, not a confirmation of a trend. It's also worth being precise about scope: this secondary market is currently built around historically significant, often estate-consigned modernist work, not the resale prospects of a living contemporary artist's earlier pieces, which is a separate and much less established question.
Why this matters if you already own East African painting
If you own a work by an artist with real exhibition history — the kind of artist a secondary-market auction would actually consider consigning — this is the first venue in the region that could plausibly test what that painting is worth today, publicly. If your painting is by a working contemporary artist without that history yet, this particular market doesn't have a track record for you either way, and that's a fact about the market's youth, not about the work.
— Njeri Wachira
Source: Art Auction East Africa organisers' own site (artauctioneastafrica.com); Strauss & Co's published results from the November 2025 sale.