African contemporary art is pretty recent, dating from the fifties and sixties when young talents graduating from the new art colleges began to paint and sculpt as profession. I have been there from the beginning. Outside the state museums and Eurocentric private collections on the continent my collection is among the most representative of the evolution of modern art in Africa providing for the public a delightful collective memory.

I am a grandson of Nana Kwadwo Osei Owusu Nkwantabisa, a prominent Adanse chief exiled with the Asante King, Nana Agyeman Prempeh The First, by the British to the Seychelles from 1889 to 1924. It was at the height of the British colonial pacification of then powerful, independent, Ashanti Kingdom. My passion for art was nurtured by this singular history while growing up in the 1960s in modern Ghana, surrounded by regalia and aristocratic paraphernalia at my grandfather’s and other Akan courts.

I acquired my first work of art, an Asante sculpture, at age ten. Six decades on I am still collecting; from Art Premier to Contemporary, especially its modern beginnings in East, Central and Southern Africa.

Decades of an international career crisscrossing Africa, successively as a Reuters correspondent, a United Nations senior official and, latterly, as managing director of East Africa’s famed Gallery Watatu, Nairobi, afforded me an encyclopaedic knowledge of the vibrant African art scene and the exciting growth therein.