[MSN] Africa's best art collection goes up in smoke.

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Africa's best art collection goes up in smoke 

BY JOHN KAMAU

It took a lifetime for Alan Donovan and former Vice-President Joseph Murumbi
to build African Heritage.

It took a single fire to almost destroy it completely yesterday. 

This is the second fire, after another in 1976, to hit African Heritage. The
last time it happened, galleries, workshops, and stores were destroyed.

Yesterday's fire almost brought to an end Africa's best-known collection of
priceless heritage.

While Donovan had sold the struggling enterprise to Makena Mwiraria, a
daughter of former Finance minister, David Mwiraria for Sh12 million three
years ago, its demise will be a terrible loss for a man who braved the
Biafran War and abandoned all pretence of being an American bureaucrat to
come and dream - together with Murumbi - on how to start a Pan African
Centre in Nairobi.

It was the trio of Donovan, Murumbi and his wife Sheila who put together the
little resources they had to start African Heritage and like a sphinx, it
rose to claim the number one position in African arts. 

When it thrived, it had 51 outlets, and 5,000 contract workers but all this
came to a halting screech when it went on a downward spiral, thanks to a
collapsing tourism sector. 

African Heritage is the result of determination that started when Donovan
bought a Volkswagen to cross the Sahara Desert and later scour the continent
in search of art, craft and textiles hitherto unassembled in a single
locale.

But it was in Kenya where he got thrilled by the simplicity and beauty of
Turkana artefacts that he finally decided to become a collector after
meeting the Murumbis - who he later described as "born collectors of African
art".