Samaki Likankoa
Biography

Samaki Likankoa was born in Diaca village on the Mueda Plateau in northern Mozambique and migrated to Mtwara, in southern Tanzania, in the early 1950s, joining the community of Makonde carvers then working under the patronage of the Dar es Salaam entrepreneur Mohamed Peera.

In 1959, after Peera initially dismissed his work, Likankoa carved a bulbous-bodied, spindly-legged spirit figure that sold immediately and became the template for the shetani genre — the abstracted, five-registered spirit figures that came to define the modern Makonde sculpture movement. He went on to mentor a number of younger carvers directly, among them Dastan Simon Nyedi (Simon Dastani), Chanuo Maundu and Andriki Alimali.

Likankoa kept his distance from the church and from the movement's later institutional life, and by most accounts drank heavily in his later years. He died destitute in 1989, having founded, more or less single-handedly, the genre that would carry the Makonde sculpture tradition to international collections.

source: Makonde Modern research report (eaman.org)

[read more about the Modern Makonde Sculpture Movement here]