Sculpture and Identity

The Makonde of Mueda plateau in Cabo Delgado Province, Mozambique, possessed one of the richest woodcarving traditions in Eastern Africa, and even appear to have made finely decorated wooden medicine boxes that were traded along the local trade networks of the lower Rovuma River. However, the woodcarvers who made them never carved full time. Patronage by external ethnic groups has often been a significant factor in the history of African sculpture; but the economic and social changes that attended the colonial era allowed Makonde and other woodcarvers to begin carving for foreigners on an unprecedented scale. European patronage helped a vast woodcarving industry to develop, the like of which had not been seen in the region before. New genre figures and forms were invented and carvers took on roles and ways of working that that were often not permissible in the pre-colonial context. Towards the end of the colonial era and in post-colonial times (which began around the early 1960s for the formerly British-held countries) the new social and economic landscape allowed Eastern Africans involved in woodcarving, especially migrant Makonde carvers in Tanzania, to develop as independent sculptors with strong ‘artistic’ identities. These developments corresponded with some remarkable innovations, including the shetani, or ‘spirit’, figures invented by Samaki Likankoa during the 1950s

Aesthetics · Art · Carving · Sculpture · Visual arts · African history and culture studies

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