01:18 GMT 26th January 2012
His daughter Hadeel Ibrahim, intervened at the eleventh hour with a cash lifeline just as trustees were poised to sell the 19th century building in the upmarket Covent Garden area of the capital earlier this year.
Ibrahim's $18.5m package involves a coalition of African investors and the building's restoration and redesign by Ghanaian wunderkind David Adjaye.
The Africa Centre board of trustees is currendy studying the proposal along with its own scheme to sell the premises and buy a new building in central London.
'We are taking our time over this- we want to get it right,' said Kaye Whiteman, vicechair of the Africa Centre Council of Management.
When news was leaked of the board's plan to sell off number 38 ICing Street in March there was an immediate outcry with members accusing trustees of trying to sneak the sale through.
A noisy campaign to halt the sale was quickly launched, backed by high profile figures like Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Youssou N'dour, and by August the counterscheme to refurbish the building had been put on the table.
Gifted by liberal-minded Catholics in 1962, the Africa Centre became a place where politics, art, music and food seamlessly converged to create a home from home. Its palatial central hall, known as the Auction Hall after its original use, was famous for its lively parties.
At one of them to celebrate Tanzania's independence day in 197 4, an exuberant President Julius Nyerere cast all formality aside to strut his stuff on the dance floor. A regular haunt of exiled members of southern African liberation movements, it was said their debates would continue over hot pepper soup in the basement Calabash restaurant.
The Africa Centre also hosted book launches, exhibitions, film shows and talks. In an event to discuss African music in 1972, the president of Senegal, Leopold Senghor, unexpectedly turned up in the audience and, once spotted, agreed, to deliver an impromptu lecture on rhythm.
'A lot of different people have their own Africa Centre story,' said writer and television producer Onyekachi Wambu, one of the supporters of the Save Africa Centre campaign. 'As a young guy in the 1970s, I saw my first African film there, Ceddo, which changed my ideas of what cinema could do. It has been an important building in bringing Africa closer to us.'
When the Africa Centre opened, Covent Garden was London's main fruit and vegetable market, full of life but noisy and shabby too. Today the market has gone and the area has smartened up to become one of the capital's main tourist haunts, something that should have been in the Africa Centre's favour.
Instead, it seemed to go the other way. Poorly managed and lurching from one financial crisis to another, the rear of the premises was sold off to raise funds in the 1980s, but to no avail. The upkeep proved too cosdy and the building began to deteriorate. An ambitious attempt to revive the Africa Centre's fortunes a few years ago was killed off by the financial downturn.
'I have been a trustee since 1999 and I hung in there because I believed something could be made of it,' said Whiteman who attended the Africa Centre's official opening as a young reporter by Zambia's founding president Kenneth Kaunda almost 50 years ago. 'I feel a deep attachment to its history and its legacy, but I also have a strong personal concern that it should have a more sustainable future.'
It is what both sides want. But at the beginning of the year, property developers offered to buy the building for $16m and turn it into a high end men's clothing store. Opponents of the sale insisted that a move away from its historic base was unthinkable. 'So much of importance happened there that it cannot just be swept away, as the trustees wish to do, by selling this building to a property developer,' Tutu wrote in the UK's Guardian newspaper at the time.
Then, just as the board prepared to confirm its decision to sell in June, Hadeel Ibrahim proposed a motion for a stay of execution at an extraordinary general meeting. She was given six weeks to come up with a refurbishment scheme.
We believe this a commercially viable proposal and hope that the trustees take it seriously,' said Dele Fatunla, spokesperson for the Save campaign, which now has more than 4,000 supporters.
'Africa as a whole is experiencing a renaissance, economically, and in art, music and literature too. It would be ironic if, at the very moment the rest of the world takes Africa seriously, the Africa Centre closed.'
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