The ‘West Wind’ in Miriam Makeba’s 1966 song blew from Ghana, nine years independent. And it resonates still as Nancy Dantas names the exhibition at the centre of this year’s 1-54 London after it. Dantas, a Johannesburg-born art historian based in Almada whose book on Gerard Sekoto came out last year, has gathered 10 artists who began their defining work in the mid-20th century. Skunder Boghossian, Bertina Lopes, Gerard Sekoto, Kofi Antubam, Sam Joseph Ntiro, Papa Ibra Tall and Uzo Egonu, all presented by Hannah O’Leary Fine Art, join Baya and Rafik El Kamel from Selma Feriani Gallery and Ibrahim El-Salahi from Vigo Gallery.

Dantas rewinds to May 1963, when Makeba was the only musician invited to sing at the founding of the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa, and retells a scene from Makeba’s memoir: a palace hall lined with mirrors and the singer reflected in them in a dress she had worn on her arrival in America and a silk hat shaped like a fez. She sang an Ethiopian song she had learned for the occasion, to a standing ovation, and that night soldiers knocked at her hotel door with a signed copy of a book by Guinea’s president, Sékou Touré.

“The song ‘West Wind’, released some years later, was a homage to the change and desire for African emancipation, freedom and fraternity, which materialised with Nkrumah of Ghana,” Dantas says. “Makeba’s performance trajectory indirectly lends itself as a soundtrack to independence, and the streams, rifts and shifts of the independence era, and its afterlife. She is the connector in the exhibition of artists from across the continent and its diaspora.”

Sekoto left South Africa for Paris in 1947, shortly before the National Party came to power, and never went back; he played piano and sang in the city’s bars and nightclubs to support himself. In ‘Paris Métro’, a small oil on card from 1959, commuters in hats and overcoats wait under the arched ceiling of a station, all chalky creams and pale blues, the figures outlined in black as though drawn on plaster. He died in Paris in 1993, a year before South Africa's first democratic election, and last year his self-portrait hung down the side of the Centre Pompidou, advertising the museum's exhibition ‘Paris Noir’.

Léopold Sédar Senghor steered Papa Ibra Tall from architecture to fine art, and in 1966 the two founded Senegal’s national tapestry manufactory at Thiès. His study for ‘Wonders of the Bush’, gouache on black paper from about 1965, is as densely worked as any of his tapestries: a green figure hung with beads sits on the shoulders of a masked one and holds up a staff that ends in a white flower the size of a sun, among outsized pink leaves and long-necked birds fanning their tails at the edges.

Tall also helped organise the contemporary art exhibition at Senghor’s First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar in 1966, whose racially defined idea of African culture largely left North Africa out. Algiers answered in 1969 with the Pan-African Cultural Festival, where Makeba sang “both uplifting and critical songs of joy and protest”, Dantas explains. ‘West Wind’ traces how several of the ten artists met at gatherings like these, FESTAC in Lagos in 1977 among them, and its frame, she says, “reminds us of certain ideological schisms, between the négritude propounded by Senghor and pan-Africanism as advocated by Touré”.

The Algerian painter Baya was 16 when Aimé Maeght gave her a solo exhibition at his Paris gallery in 1947, with a catalogue preface by André Breton, though she spent her life declining the Surrealist label and called what she did Baya-ism. “The exhibition highlights how North African artists, like their peers further south, were celebrating place and aesthetic traditions, which had been disparaged by colonial authorities as minor. And how these artists too, with and in spite of their exposure to foreign circles, were holding onto and expanding identity, with their art as a practice of freedom,” says Dantas.

Baya married the musician Mahfoud Mahieddine in 1953 and did not paint again until 1963. Next June, Tate Modern opens the first UK solo exhibition of her work. The large gouache Selma Feriani brings, from 1995, is Baya at full volume: a deep-blue vase crowned with petals and flanked by bunches of dark grapes on a yellow ground, with two speckled pink birds strutting along the bottom edge as though they owned the place.

Selma Feriani also brings the Tunisian painter Rafik El Kamel, among the first of his generation to turn to abstraction, whose untitled acrylic of 1983 is all peach and whitewash, broken by blocks of blue and black and slashes of yellow and red. “This El Kamel painting presents what look like doorways and windows, or liminal spaces, which I think are useful metaphors,” Dantas adds. “A pan-African framing re-grounds North African practices, whilst challenging simplistic readings of Africa, which has deep connections with the broader Islamic and global worlds.”

In 2022, as 1-54 London marked its 10th edition, founder Touria El Glaoui spoke of the fair as a place to find new artists. “Discovery is still at the heart of 1-54. An artist doesn’t have to be young for their work to be new to you,” El Glaoui says now. “Museums and scholars are revisiting African modernism and artists who have been overlooked in art history. For many visitors, it will be their first encounter with Rafik El Kamel or Papa Ibra Tall. For me, discovery includes looking back.”

This is an interesting moment to take this path. Koyo Kouoh, who ran the fair’s events in its early years, and conceived this year’s Venice Biennale before her sad passing in 2025, once told a 1-54 audience that she had taken part on condition that she would not have to discuss the market. For everyone else, the market has provided plenty to discuss: auction sales of works by African artists peaked at $116.5 million in 2022 (according to the Artnet Price Database), fell steeply for two years and recovered by 43 per cent in 2025, to $70.5 million. In April 2025, Sotheby’s shelved its Modern and Contemporary African Art department, and Hannah O’Leary, who built it and has set more than 200 auction records, now advises collectors and institutions through her own firm, which is why so much of ‘West Wind’ bears her name.

Sotheby’s now sells African artists in its main sales, as Phillips does with South Asian modernists, which leaves 1-54, a fair built around the category, to make its argument from the inside; a panel this year, titled Contemporary African Art After the Spotlight, asks what comes next. “Our independence gives us the freedom to choose where we put our energy,” El Glaoui says. “’West Wind’ reflects a direction I want to pursue: bringing modern and contemporary African art into conversation, with room to look closely at both. African artists helped shape art history. I want our programme to reflect their contribution. I also want to see more collecting on the continent and more of these works entering permanent museum collections.”

Modern artists have shown at 1-54 before, El Glaoui points out, “including through Loeve&Co’s presentations”, and the Paris gallery’s booth is the one to make for first. Aubrey Williams, who spent two years among the Warrau people of north-west British Guiana before moving to London in 1952, painted ‘Arawak dream’ in 1959: chalk-white forms, part bone and part bird, drift across an ochre ground scabbed with rust and brick red, like a petroglyph prised from its rock.

Twins Seven Seven, so named as the only surviving child of seven sets of twins, was an itinerant dancer when he gate-crashed a party at the Mbari Mbayo Club in Osogbo and stayed for the Beiers’ workshops. In his untitled panel of 1974, a goggle-eyed figure crowned with red plumes and a dotted yellow halo towers over a smaller one at its knee, every inch of the surface patterned. Guido Llinás’s ‘Pintura Negra’ of 1981, black slashes over salmon pink and grey, belongs to the Black Paintings he began after leaving Cuba for Paris in 1963, drawing on anaforuana, a sign system of Nigerian origin.

Dantas would stop a first-time visitor at El-Salahi’s ‘Meditation Tree’, a dark, many-branched bronze on a base that ripples like water, which stands in the middle of her exhibition as a sign of “continental resilience and rebirth”. It began as one of his pen-and-ink drawings and became, in 2018, the first sculpture he ever made, when he was in his late 80s. His tree sculptures appeared at 1-54 that same year, and eight years on, the tree is back at Somerset House.

El-Salahi trained at the Slade in the 1950s, and his trajectory, as Dantas puts it, “defies East-West divisions, but also contributes to our understanding of Africans in London.” His memoir, ‘At Home in the World’, has stories of the Alliance Club and the British Council, the Black communities of Brixton and his time as secretary of the Sudanese Students’ Union, all of it “just a chapter”, she says, “of a brimming life we honour”.

“In the exhibition, the meditation tree becomes a palaver tree, a central symbol of African dialogue, negotiation, consensus-building that encourages the participation of elders and women in decision making,” Dantas says. El-Salahi's tree is the haraz, an acacia that grows on the banks of the Nile and is bare through the rainy season, coming into leaf when the weather turns dry, which he has long taken personally: “When everyone is going to be green let them be green, I am not.”