All correspondence, including COA verification, documentation requests, ownership transfers, and inventory updates, is currently handled via official email channels.

Here's why a digital ledger is important.

Sankofa is a provenance ledger preserving the history of art and patronage in Africa, beginning with Nigeria.

It's never been anyone's job to keep a paper trail of West African Art. We think that should change.

For now, we're beginning with a specific and strict criteria: we only document living artists and the estates of pioneer modernists. We'd rather have undeniably verified records for a few hundred works than unverifiable works for thousands. 

Provenance isn't paperwork. It's part of the value.

At auction, two identical works by the same artist can sell for very different prices. The one with a documented history — who owned it, where it's been shown, how it changed hands — sells higher. The one with gaps gets discounted, or pulled from the sale entirely. Auction houses and insurers treat an unclear history as risk, and risk costs money.

For West African art, those gaps are common because for most of the last century, no one was keeping the record. Work left the continent or changed hands within it with nothing written down. That absence doesn't just cost individual sales. It has shaped how the whole market values the region's art against work from places with longer paper trails.

Repatriation makes the cost of that absence visible. Cases like the Benin Bronzes took decades to resolve, and a lot of that time went into work that shouldn't have been necessary — tracing objects through colonial-era shipping manifests, museum accession logs, and private collections across three continents — just to establish who took what and when. The claim itself often wasn't in question. Proving the chain was the hard part.

A ledger doesn't prevent the circumstances that make repatriation necessary. But it changes what the process looks like afterward. If a work's history is recorded from the point it enters the system, a claim becomes a matter of checking a record instead of reconstructing one from scratch. What took years could take weeks.

We can't fix the gaps already in the market. What we can do is make sure the next hundred years of West African art don't have the same problem.

Our Services

Documentation

Every work gets its own record: medium, dimensions, exhibitions history, ownership and consignment history, written references. Useful for a single piece  or for tracking an entire body of work.

Documentation ranges between ₦ 2,500 - 10,000 per artwork depending on quantity and exhibition history.

Certificate of Authenticity
A record that holds up when you're not in the room to vouch for it yourself. We confirm authorship, condition, and ownership at the time we issue it, tied to a Sankofa ID that stays with the work.
CoA issuance is ₦35,000 per work

*please note, documentation is required  prior to issuing CoAs.

Ownership Transfer
When a work changes hands, we update who holds it. The ID and its history stay the same. We charge an ownership transfer fee of ₦25,000  to keep this running.

Inventory Management

Feel FREE to email us for updates on your inventory. Applies to documented works only. 

Confidentiality

We don't share your contact details or ownership history with anyone, inside our network or outside it without your say first.

In practice, that mostly means one thing: before we ever confirm a transfer, or reach out to an artist or dealer on your behalf, we ask you. We're not going to pretend there's a more complicated system behind this. It's just a rule we hold ourselves to, and we'd rather tell you plainly what it covers than make it sound bigger than it is.

Most of the time, contacting an artist is about something ordinary, like confirming a consignment with a gallery, or a commission arranged through a dealer or collector. Nothing happens without you knowing first.