I am becoming a grumpy old man. The desire to pretend to be deaf and poke children with a walking stick is receding slightly but the anger remains.

Now it is directed towards those few remaining cheerleaders of the academically challenged who regularly praise artists whose main selling point is their back story.

Thus: This one can hardly sign his own name but his work is wonderful; that one teaches children how to paint (ooohh! aaahh!) and this other one, like many, was thought to be crazy because he gave up a good job to be a painter but (gosh!) his talent is amazing and (wow!) he is really a great artist.

Then there is the one who fell heavily in love and spared us little in his descriptions and depictions of his doomed affair. We have been suffering for too long from the aftermath of cynical marketing ploys skillfully promulgated by gallery owners well tuned to the sensibilities of Western buyers who cared more for the narrative than the art.

It is true there are gifted outsiders whose vision transcends their technical abilities, but they were able to develop unique styles to express themselves. In Kenya, Kivuthi Mbuno and Ancent Soi spring to mind. But generally the market has been flooded with untutored talent tailored to the requirements of a moneyed Western clientele.

Compounding the crime, the artists were puffed and praised by nervous curators backed by critics desperate to appear politically correct and ahead of the curve.

Of course, attractive pictures occasionally were made and sold; charming scenes with a freshness and innocence that beguiled. A few of them managed a bit of social commentary too, protests at injustice and, recently, sincere expressions of outrage at terrorist attacks — talking points for Western walls.

But for heaven’s sake, just look at most of the work these artists made: Garish colours, weak drawing, incoherent lighting and tortured paint. Surely most real art requires technical skill, rigour, self discipline and relentless hard work?

Indeed it does — and thankfully now a new game is afoot with East African artists competing with fresh and relevant ideas, confident in their technical skills and with a commitment that transcends boundaries.

In the age of the Internet we are part of the wider world: The cows are drinking from a global trough. After all, it was Africans who profoundly influenced a major shift in the mainstream of international art in the 1900s, when carvings of masks, ancestor figures, fetishes and household objects like boxes, spoons and stools were absorbed into the work of the Cubists and Fauves.

The result was developed by Africa’s painters and sculptors who reclaimed their heritage and used it as the springboard to startle the art scene with their innovation and creativity.

This continues with African artists and those from the diaspora leading the charge. No wonder their stock has risen, with galleries and auction houses falling over each other to handle their work.

Step forward the British-Ghanaian painter Kimathi Donkor with his large-scale pictures of decisive moments in the history of the diaspora, including the Haitian revolution and Harriet Tubman’s role in the emancipation of slaves in the US.

And note the contribution of El Anatsui, a Ghanaian based in Nigeria whose monumental sculptures echo his African roots. Lately he has produced gigantic screens referring back to his country’s iconic kente cloth. His work is international in outlook and inspirational in its reference to traditional African beliefs.

There is too the late Haitian-American Jean Michel Basquiat whose influences — a wry urban angst distilled through graffiti — resound locally in the paintings of Ehoodi Kichape of Kenya.

Yes, our regional identity is still secure. But now it is the subject matter, the artists’ concerns, that make the mark, not the clashing colours, flailing paint and dubious drawing as before ……. corruption, free and fair elections, the oppression of many by the few, health, sexual politics and the hegemony of donor states.

Our artists’ skills delight us; their polemic sometimes slips subtlety beneath the radar to appear only to those with the eyes to see and the power to act. I am not alone in this view.

A few tiny hen-like dinosaurs continue to scurry around squawking and squeaking hopefully in favour of academic ineptitude, but appointments of African experts at the Tate Modern in London, plus the establishment of galleries in capital cities from the US to Japan, promoting African art as vibrant, exciting — and mainstream — encourage me to believe we are at last in a new and flourishing era.

This is a logical continuation of the influences that began in the 1900s, but, whatever the timeline, we now look at the qualities of the art itself — paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, videos and installations — rather than the folksy tales about the people who created them that seem to obsess some outdated galleries and their supporters.

You want names and examples of people at the forefront of this resurgence in excellence?

How about Peterson Kamwathi and his Sitting Allowance series of charcoal drawings about the 2007 post-election crisis, plus his woodcuts and etchings dealing with the social, political and environmental repercussions of Kenya’s emergence into democracy (one of which sold to the British Museum)?

Then there is Michael Soi with his witty commentary on how wananchi resist oppression plus his attack on Chinese influence in Kenya, and Richard Kimathi with his elegantly painted take on our sexualities, and Ehoodi Kichape and his vision of a cheerfully disintegrating society, and Paul Onditi and his reflections on the fate of Smokey, the cheeky chappie making his way defiantly in a hostile world, and Shabu Mwangi and his autobiographical pleas for a more peaceful world, and Gor Soudan and his astounding new take on the Crucifixion — possibly the first fresh look at that oldest of artistic subjects for around 500 years.

Add to the list Syowia Kyambi and James Muriuki, with their cutting-edge installations, films and photographs. Kyambi is currently concerned with the emotional impact on women of their assumed roles within society and she is planning a mixed media event on that subject for next month’s Kenya Art Fair.

This month Kyambi, Kamwathi and Onditi showed at the prestigious 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair at Somerset House, in London.

From the diaspora, the renowned ceramicist Magdalene Odundo is showing a new installation in glass at the National Glass Centre in Sunderland in the north-east of the UK. All these examples are just from Kenyans with, in this region, a further six countries and their artists to go at.

Perhaps, after all, there is some hope and now I do not feel quite so grumpy, after all.