The law already gives African artists a cut of every resale. Almost no one pays it

Modern and contemporary African art sold at auction for $62.8 million in 2025, up 42.6% on the year before, outpacing an 11.1% rise in the global auction market overall. That is the headline the fairs and auction houses like to repeat. The quieter number is how little of it reaches the artist whose name is on the painting the second, third, or tenth time it changes hands.

What the law actually says

The policy built for exactly this problem has a name: artist resale royalty, or droit de suite, a legal right to a cut of the price every time a work is resold. More than 80 countries have it on the books. Senegal and Congo put the right on the agenda of WIPO's copyright committee back in 2015, pushing for wider recognition across the rest.

Kenya already has a resale royalty law. Its 2019 Copyright Amendment Act sets the rate at 5% of the net resale price, makes the right inalienable, and puts the seller, the dealer, the agent, and the buyer all on the hook to pay it. What the law does not do is say who actually collects it. Visual artists can form a collective management organization to administer the right. If none exists, Kenya's Attorney-General can simply designate an existing one to take on the job. As of the most recent reporting found, no dedicated visual-arts body had stepped up to do it.

Nigeria passed something similar in its Copyright Act 2022. Section 17 gives an artist an inalienable right to a share of the proceeds whenever a work is resold at public auction or through a dealer, even after the artist's first sale of it. Here too the gap is enforcement. No collecting society exists to run it. Nothing tracks a Nigerian artist's work once it leaves the country and resells abroad.

South Africa, the continent's deepest auction market, has no resale royalty law at all. A version was written into the Copyright Amendment Bill years ago as Section 7B, with the rate to be set by the Minister and the seller and the auction house jointly liable to pay it. The whole Bill has been stuck since South Africa's Constitutional Court ruled it unconstitutional in June 2026, and the resale royalty had nothing to do with it. The Court's objection was to a fair-use exception written for schools and libraries. The President cannot sign the Bill as it stands and has sent it back to Parliament, with no date for when, or whether, a rewritten version returns. The royalty clause is collateral damage in a fight that isn't about artists at all.

One auction house decided not to wait. Aspire Art Auctions has paid living South African artists a resale royalty out of its own commission, on a sliding scale modeled on EU and UK practice, since its first sale in Johannesburg in 2016. The right lapses when the artist dies. It does not pass to an estate. By a 2017 account, Aspire had already paid out more than R100,000 under the scheme, the only African house doing so at the time. Nearly a decade on, there is no public figure for what that total looks like now, and no sign a second house has matched it.