ABSTRACT
Although East Africa is often neglected in surveys of African art, in which masks and sculpted human figures generally constitute the main focus of interest, the sculptural traditions of the Mozambican Makonde have not gone unnoticed. As early as 1906 Karl Weule commented enthusiastically on the quality of the “Mavia” medicine containers (dinumba) he was sold by the Newala Makonde in southern Tanzania while collecting for the Leipzig Ethnological Museum. They evidently appealed to his European taste in their ornamentation, their naturalistic style and the virtuosity with which they were carved. Thus:
It is above all the little wooden boxes in which the people keep their snuff, their medicines, and sometimes their gunpowder – which show real taste and a style and execution which can pass muster even from our point of view. The ornamentation which the older generation of men carry about on their skins in the form of keloids is applied to the lids of these boxes. Some of them take the shape of animals … Human heads, too are found among these carvings, and are executed with the same skill in technique. Most of them have the hair dressed in a long pig-tail, and the face still more cicatrized than the Makonde; these, I learn, represent members of the Mavia tribe. 1
