The Modern Makonde Sculpture Movement

On the Mueda Plateau, straddling the Ruvuma River between northern Mozambique and southern Tanzania, carvers worked soft njala wood into masks meant to be worn once, at a single initiation rite, and set aside. Within two generations, carvers from the same tradition, working in hardwood three hundred miles away in Dar es Salaam, were shipping abstract spirit figures to collectors in Europe and Japan (...)

The Makonde people's oldest carving tradition centred on the mapiko (or, in the singular, lipiko) — wooden masks carved from soft njala wood and worn during coming-of-age initiation rites. Female masks carried lip plugs and ear spools; male "devil" masks added facial hair and sometimes horns to mark malevolent spirits. Alongside the masks, carvers produced ornamental boxes, pipes and ritual objects for use within the community, not for sale beyond it.

That changed under Portuguese colonial rule. An exhibition at the Centro Cultural dos Novos in the 1930s brought the first outside attention to Makonde carving, and colonial demand — backed by forced-labour tax systems that pushed carvers toward paid work — drew sculptors away from soft wood and toward pau-preto (African blackwood, or mpingo) and pau-rosa, materials hard enough to survive export and handling. Carving, for the first time, became a way to pay a colonial tax rather than a rite performed for one's own community.

The decisive shift happened in Dar es Salaam, across the Ruvuma in Tanzania, where many Makonde carvers had settled after leaving the Mueda Plateau. There, from the 1950s, an Ismaili entrepreneur named Mohamed Peera began commissioning figurative carvings for sale, and his patronage helped spark a run of new genres entirely disconnected from the mask tradition that preceded them. In 1959, the carver Samaki Likankoa invented what became the movement's signature form: the shetani, an abstracted spirit figure built around five recurring bodily registers — human, mammal, fish, bird, reptile — incorporating charged symbols like a mother's breast or a calabash. Roberto Yacobo Sangwani developed a second genre, the ujamaa (or dimoongo), composite sculptures of interlocking figures supporting one another; after Tanzania's 1967 Arusha Declaration, officials reinterpreted these works as visual emblems of ujamaa, the government's policy of collective self-reliance, even though Sangwani had conceived them earlier as depictions of ancestry and family. Clements Ngala pushed the form further still into abstraction with his mawingu ("clouds") sculptures, while a fourth genre, binadamu, stayed close to daily life — men smoking, women at housework — aimed squarely at buyers who wanted something legible.

Individual carvers soon began working past these templates rather than simply repeating them. Chanuo Maundu treated the shetani form as what he later called, in 1991, "a cultural action analogous to divinatory quest" — sculpture meant to astonish and unsettle rather than decorate. Dastan Simon Nyedi, known as Dastani, followed a harder road to the same result: born in Miteda village on the Mueda Plateau, he crossed into Tanzania in 1957, worked the sisal plantations around Mbopo before turning to carving, and apprenticed under both Samaki Likankoa and Abunuas Anangangola. A sharp chip of dry blackwood cost him most of the sight in one eye while he was carving with an adze, but he went on to work at the Nyumba ya Sanaa gallery in Dar es Salaam, see his sculpture exhibited in Germany and Japan, and remain active until his death in Dar es Salaam in 2005.

George Lilanga di Nyama passed through the same Nyumba ya Sanaa building a generation later, and took the movement somewhere its founders had not anticipated. Born in 1934 in Kikwetu, he learned to carve on soft cassava roots before progressing to mpingo under Mzee Sumaili, and was working as a watchman at Nyumba ya Sanaa in the 1970s when the gallery's staff noticed his carvings and reassigned him to artistic work. From there he expanded into drawing, batik and painting, translating the shetani vocabulary — swarming figures, rhythmic colour, the Mapiko dance itself — onto canvas. A 1978 Washington, D.C. group exhibition of 100 of his works drew a comparison, in the Washington Post, to Jean Dubuffet's Art Brut; Lilanga went on to exhibit across Europe, Japan and the United States and is now held by the Centre Pompidou and the Guggenheim Bilbao, among others.

The migration that fed the movement's growth was political as much as economic. Makonde carvers displaced into Tanzania were instrumental in organising MANU, founded in Dar es Salaam in 1959, which later merged into the Mozambique Liberation Front, FRELIMO; carving cooperatives sold work abroad and used the proceeds to help fund the independence struggle at home.

Sculpture, in Makonde tradition, was reserved for men — ceramic work was women's work, and treated as a separate, lesser craft. Reinata Sadimba, trained as a child in that same Makonde clay tradition, spent the years after 1975 pushing against that boundary from the opposite direction to Nyedi or Lilanga: not moving from mask to blackwood to gallery, but turning household ceramics into surreal, unsettling figures that made the case, on their own terms, for what counted as sculpture.

By the 2000s the movement that Likankoa, Sangwani and Nyedi had built was contracting. The export market that had sustained it for half a century thinned out, blackwood grew scarcer and more tightly regulated, and government support never materialised in Tanzania the way it once had under the ujamaa banner. Carvers working today describe increasing isolation; some observers now describe their generation as possibly the last to carry the craft. What endures most visibly is the visual language the movement invented — the swarming, spirit-charged figures that Lilanga carried into painting, and the boundary-breaking instinct that Sadimba carried into ceramics.

AFRICAN|CONTEMPORARY represents artists connected to this tradition, including George Lilanga di Nyama and Reinata Sadimba, with original works available to view, discover and acquire directly from the gallery.