ABSTRACT
This is a book about African art that looks in some detail at the lives of individual sculptors and takes seriously their words, ideas and explanations. It is written as a personal attempt to understand the nature and development of a unique, contemporary sculptural movement which originated during colonial times among the Makonde people of the Mueda plateau in Cabo Delgado region, Mozambique. Against a background account of the origins of this movement the book presents a study of the sculpture and ideas of a small number of influential Makonde sculptors (ultimately just two, namely, Chanuo Maundu and Dastan Nyedi), whose works can be said to represent key transformations of the highly creative shetani (or “spirit”) ‘genre’ of sculpture which took root in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, during 1959.
