Since the dawn of humanity—which happened in Africa—the creative arts have enabled people to understand and share experiences, and to build new perceptions and imagine visions of the future. African visual arts are painted and engraved on rock in over 200 000 sites, the earliest dating back 73 000 years.

Freedom Park aims to honour and commemorate our liberation struggle and humanity. One major aspect is to record and grow African knowledge systems, of which Africa's creative arts form a foundational pillar. To fulfil this mandate, Freedom Park must become a leader in understanding and positioning Africa's past and current creative arts as engines of our social transformation; rewriting the canon of global art to foreground Africa's creativity, as both a driver and an outcome of humanity's struggle for liberation.

To begin, we must challenge how, today, decades after the official end of colonialism and apartheid, the global “art world” still ignores Africa's rich legacy of creative expression. As Nigerian art historian, Chika Okeke (n.d., p. 1), points out:

It sometimes seems that we keep circling back to the comment attributed (possibly falsely) to Picasso: “African art? Never heard of it” (Bala, 2016).

That lacuna exists because the colonising powers systematically undermined and silenced Africa's creative expression. They dismissed precolonial art as “curios” and “barbarism”; rejected creative expressions of anticolonial resistance; and installed— and maintain—a global art industry comprising predominantly white, rich and male first-world buyers, collectors and commentators.

We need to assert both the existence of African art, and the validity of the distinctive cultural theories underpinning it.