One of the most difficult things to explain to somebody who is beginning to collect African art is that the greatest danger is not necessarily buying an obvious fake. The more subtle problem is that there is a considerable amount of African-looking material on the market today which was never made as traditional African art in the first place, but which, after changing hands several times, can eventually be presented and understood as an old tribal object.
This is something I have become increasingly conscious of after more than thirty years in the trade.
There has always been a market for objects made for tourists, for export and for decoration. Workshops in many parts of Africa have produced masks, figures and other objects in considerable numbers, sometimes inspired by traditional forms and sometimes copying forms that were already familiar to the international market. Some of these objects are immediately recognisable as recent work, while others can be surprisingly convincing, particularly when they have been handled or stored for many years.
The difficulty is that the original circumstances in which an object was made are often completely forgotten.
Imagine that somebody buys an African figure while travelling in Africa. Perhaps it comes from a shop, perhaps from a market, or perhaps from a trader who tells him that it is an old traditional object. The buyer likes it and, when he asks, “Is it old?”, the seller answers, “It’s older, what do you think?”, and brings it home and puts it in his living room. Twenty or thirty years later the owner dies, and his children have to dispose of the contents of the house. They know that their father travelled in Africa or worked there as a priest and collected African objects, but they may know nothing about the circumstances in which this particular figure was acquired.
The object goes to an estate sale.
Somebody sees an old-looking African sculpture and describes it as an old tribal figure. Another person buys it, perhaps because the price is attractive. A few years later it appears on an online auction or in another sale, and the description becomes a little more specific. Eventually it may be described as a traditional sculpture from a particular people, even though there was never any evidence for that attribution in the first place.
At that point, the object has acquired a history which may be considerably more interesting than its real history and has acquired what is called a “provenance”, owned by Mr. X, Y and Z.
This does not always happen because somebody is deliberately trying to deceive the next buyer. Very often it is simply the result of information being lost as objects move through the market. One person makes an assumption, the next person repeats it, and eventually the assumption begins to look like established fact. Auction houses are very sensitive to that as well, because once an object has been sold several times with the same description, that description itself can start to look like part of its history.
That is one of the reasons I am cautious when somebody tells me that an African object must be old because it has been in Europe for forty or fifty years. Even fifty years ago, a great deal of material was already being made for decoration. The fact that an object has been in Europe for a long time may be interesting information about its European history, but it does not tell us when the object was actually made, whether it was made in the right tribe and period, or even whether it was made in Africa at all. A considerable amount of this material probably came from ateliers in Cameroon.
The appearance of an object can be equally misleading.
Collectors quite naturally look at the surface of a wooden sculpture. They notice the colour, the cracks, the worn areas and perhaps traces of handling or residue. These things can certainly tell us something, and an experienced eye will pay attention to them, but none of them should be considered in isolation.
A dark surface does not automatically mean that a sculpture is old. Cracks do not automatically mean that it was used traditionally. A worn surface does not necessarily mean that the object spent many years in a village or played a ritual role. Termite holes do not necessarily mean that an object is old, and repairs do not mean that an object or mask was used for a cult. Wood changes with age, but wood can also be treated, handled, smoked, exposed to the elements and altered in other ways. Masks can be reused and repainted year after year, but they can also simply be made to look old. More importantly, even when the material itself is genuinely old, we still have to ask what exactly is old.
An old decorative object is not necessarily an old ritual object.
This distinction is often overlooked because collectors understandably concentrate on the question of age. But age is only one part of the story. Before asking how old an object is, I would rather know what it actually is, why it was made and what evidence we have for the use and cultural context that is being attributed to it.
This is where experience becomes important.
After many years of buying African objects, I do not believe that one develops some magical ability to look at a sculpture and immediately know whether it is genuine. The advantage is much more ordinary. You have simply seen a great deal of material.
You have seen good objects and bad objects. You have seen old objects and recent objects. You have seen workshop production and objects that were actually made for traditional use. You have seen objects before they were restored and after they were restored. You have seen things that initially looked unusual become familiar because you encountered them repeatedly.
That changes the way you look.
An object can appear extremely unusual when you see one example in isolation. After seeing twenty or thirty similar examples, however, your understanding of it can change completely. A mask that initially looked like a rare traditional object may turn out to be part of a type of production that was made in considerable numbers. Conversely, a sculpture that seemed rather ordinary at first may become much more interesting once you understand its construction, proportions, carving and relationship to documented examples.
This is why I believe collectors should spend time looking at good material rather than simply looking at as many African objects as possible.
There is a particular danger today because the internet gives us an almost unlimited number of photographs. It is very easy to believe that you are educating your eye by looking at hundreds or thousands of African objects online. But if the objects themselves are of uncertain origin, you can gradually begin to use them as your visual reference. A better way to use the internet is to add the word “museum” to your search. If you want to know what a Songye looks like, do not search simply for “Songye”, but search for “Songye museum” or “Songye Sotheby’s”.
Otherwise, it becomes a dangerous way to learn.
If you repeatedly look at recent workshop production and accept it as traditional African art, those objects gradually become normal to your eye. You start to recognise the characteristics of the wrong material. Eventually you may find that a genuinely old object looks strange to you simply because it does not resemble the things you have been studying.
This is why museums, curated art fairs and specialised auctions with good curators and reputable dealers are so important.
When you visit a serious African art collection, you are not simply looking for beautiful objects. You are building a visual vocabulary. You can compare different artistic traditions and different levels of quality. You can look closely at carving, construction, proportions and surfaces. You can begin to understand how objects belonging to the same tradition can vary while still sharing certain characteristics.
For collectors in Belgium, the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren is an obvious place to spend time. The Musée du quai Branly in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, or the various museums with databases listed at https://buyafricanantiques.com/2026/03/19/museums-with-important-african-art-collections/ are also important resources for training your eye. Books and museum catalogues are equally useful, provided that they are used to develop an understanding rather than simply to find a photograph that resembles the object you happen to be considering.
The more material you study, the more you begin to understand that rarity is also a complicated subject.
I often hear collectors say that something must be rare because they have never seen another example. But there is an important difference between an object being rare and an object being rarely offered for sale.
Something may be relatively common in its original environment but uncommon in European collections. Another object may appear to be extremely unusual simply because you have never encountered the particular workshop or production centre from which it came.
The reverse can also happen. An object may be everywhere in the decorative market, like Punu masks, Kota reliquaries or Yombe nail “fetishes”, and appear unusual to a collector who is new to African art, even if these forms are rare and highly valued by experienced collectors.
This is one reason why I am rather sceptical of the idea of treasure hunting as a collecting strategy.
Of course, genuine discoveries are made, and regularly you read those stories in the newspapers. Every experienced dealer has encountered interesting objects in unexpected places, and occasionally somebody really does find something that others have overlooked. But the idea that the market is full of important African sculptures waiting for an inexperienced collector to discover them at a fraction of their value is another matter entirely.
The professional dealer who has spent decades looking at African art has already seen an enormous quantity of material before the collector ever encounters it. The collector sees the one object on the table, while the experienced dealer may remember the other fifty that looked remarkably similar. That difference matters, and it is also why I would be careful about becoming too confident simply because you have read a lot of books or handled a certain number of objects. Reading is essential. Handling objects is essential. But there is knowledge that only comes from seeing good and bad material repeatedly over a very long period.
The more difficult objects are not the obviously bad reproductions. Most collectors eventually learn to recognise those. The real challenge is the object which contains just enough convincing characteristics to make you comfortable with it.
That is where context, provenance, comparison and experience become increasingly important. None of them is infallible by itself, but together they allow you to form a much more informed judgement.
For me, this is ultimately what collecting African art is about.
It is not about learning to identify every ethnic group from a photograph, nor is it about memorising a checklist of characteristics that supposedly proves that a mask is old. Those things can be useful, but they are only the beginning.
You need to understand how objects were made, why they were made, where they were used and how they entered the market. You need to know what genuinely old material looks like, but you also need to understand what more recent production from the same regions can look like.
And you have to accept that sometimes the answer is simply not certain.
I actually think that recognising when you do not know is one of the signs that your eye is becoming more experienced. When you are beginning to collect, there is a natural temptation to want every question answered. With experience, you become more comfortable with the fact that some objects require further research, more comparison or simply more time before a responsible conclusion can be reached.
After more than thirty years of buying and selling African antiques, I still find that the best way to look at an object is to remain curious about it rather than immediately deciding what it is. The questions I ask are fairly simple: where did it come from, who made it, what was it made for, does the carving make sense, does the surface make sense, and does the history make sense? Does the object actually correspond with what we know about the artistic tradition to which it is supposed to belong?
Sometimes the answer is clear. Sometimes it is not.
For a serious collector, that is not a problem. It is part of the process of learning.
The best collectors I know are not necessarily the people who buy the most objects. They are the people who have gradually learned to distinguish between something that merely looks interesting and something that remains interesting after you have asked a few more questions.
Conclusion and final advice to African Art collectors.
This is why my advice to collectors has always been to look at as many good objects as possible, preferably in museums and serious collections, to read the literature, to handle genuine old pieces whenever the opportunity arises, and to develop relationships with serious dealers and other people who have spent many years working with this material.
Most importantly, do not allow the desire to make a discovery to become more important than the object itself. When something seems particularly exciting, take a step back and look at it again. Ask what you actually know about it, rather than what you have been told about it. And when you look again at it, does it still convince you, or are you having doubts? Good objects will tell you when you should not have doubts.
Because in the end, collecting African art is a process of educating your eye.
And the more you learn, the more you realise that the important question is not simply whether an object looks old.
The important question is whether everything you know about the object makes sense, and whether you are working with serious people.