Charles Sekano, 1943-2024
Biography

Charles Ezekiel Molefi Sekano was born on 18 November 1943 in Sophiatown, South Africa. He witnessed his community’s forced removal under apartheid and was displaced with his family to Meadowlands, Soweto. At 21 he left South Africa, travelling through Botswana and Tanzania before being granted political asylum in Kenya in 1967.

Sekano spent roughly thirty years in exile, becoming a fixture of Nairobi’s artistic and musical life — known there as “Charlie in Exile” — and gathering with other exiled southern African artists and freedom fighters at the National Theatre Bar. He described his practice as the “3 P’s”: Painting, Piano and Poetry, working across bold, multi-coloured pastel portraits of women, piano composition and verse, and at times constructing coiled-wire mobile sculptures, shown at Nairobi’s Goethe-Institut.

He exhibited with Gallery Watatu during his years in Kenya and returned to South Africa in 1998, four years after the country’s first democratic election. From 2011 he was represented internationally by the London dealer Ed Cross, and in 2015 held what would be his last major Kenyan exhibition, at Red Hill Art Gallery in Nairobi. He died on 22 June 2024, aged 81.

source: Daily Nation; The Standard; Business Daily Africa; Red Hill Art Gallery; Artsy