Makonde.

MAKONDE Jesper Kirknaes and Jorn Korn Rhodos, Copenhagen, 1999. 156 pp., 174 & 5 color photos, map. Kr 298 softcover.

A HOST OF DEVILS The History and Context of the Making of Makonde Spirit Sculpture Zachary Kingdon Routledge, London and New York, 2002. 252 pp., 64 b/w photos, 2 maps. $90 hardcover.

Since the late 1950s, the art world has associated the Makonde people of southeast Africa with the striking ebony wood sculptures produced by their finest artists. Two recently published books contribute to the visual and written record of Makonde sculptors and their works. The first, bearing the simple title Makonde, was produced by Jesper Kirknaes, a social anthropologist and photographer who has conducted research and worked in development in East Africa since 1968, and Jorn Korn, a doctor specializing in social medicine who for more than a decade advised international development organizations in East Africa on primary health care initiatives. The second book, A Host of Devils: The History and Context of the Making of Makonde Spirit Sculpture, is by Zachary Kingdon, who at the time he conducted field research in the early 1990s was a graduate student at the University of East Anglia (England) but is now the curator of African collections at the Liverpool Museum.

Most of the photographs (taken by Kirknaes) in Makonde date from the 1960s, when Kirknaes and Korn worked in association with the Nordic Tanganyika Project (an integrated rural development program) located in Kihaba, 45 kilometers northwest of Dar es Salaam. Whereas other expatriates with the Project purchased carvings from the Makonde who brought them to the Project compound, Korn tells us that he and Kirknaes initially found the subject matter and style of these works "trivial"--a woman with a water jar or hoe, a hashpipe-smoking man--and declined to buy them. One day, however, a carver showed them a "flat-faced, broadly grinning female creature ... dancing on her hands ... with her legs high in the air behind her long, pointed ears"--a piece that the carver told them depicted a "merry little shetani whore." The amused Kirknaes and Korn bought the piece and put it on their mantel. Within a short while they had developed a sizable collection of works, many of which were produced by the same artist, Rashidi bin Mohamed. In time their patronage contributed to the emergence of a small but lively group of Makonde sculptors in Kihaba.

Korn and Kirknaes's patronage was laden with contradiction. On the one hand, they celebrated the naivete and purity of Makonde carvers. Korn proudly asserts that he and Kirknaes "offer[ed] no comments" on the works brought to them and that they "took care to keep any art books etc. out of sight" so that carvers would not attempt to mimic unfamiliar forms or try to anticipate the tastes of their buyers. On the other hand, he and Kirknaes worked to introduce these carvers and their works to a cosmopolitan audience and to establish their status within the art world as full-fledged artists. Kirknaes and Korn eventually persuaded a Danish nongovernmental organization to market Makonde carvings which the two provided the organization and to use the revenues to fund small-scale development projects in Tanzania. The authors also arranged funding from the German Goethe Institute to sponsor a show in Dar es Salaam of works produced by the Kihaba group of sculptors. It was, Korn suggests, the first show to exhibit Makonde carvings as pieces of art attributed to individual artists rather than as anonymous cultural artifacts.

Korn and Kirknaes's 1974 publication, Modern Makonde Art (London: Hamlyn), was similarly innovative in that it not only attributed the works it depicted to specific artists but also offered short biographies of these sculptors. Makonde contains many of the same images first published in Modern Makonde Art as well as brief essays on the works and lives of the same five sculptors: Rashidi bin Mohamed, Kashimiri Matayo, Yoseph Francis, Nafasi Mpagua, and Hossein Anangangola. Some of the biographical essays are considerably more detailed than others, apparently because of the authors' greater familiarity with certain of these artists.

Korn tells us that Nafasi Mpagua persisted in bringing pieces to him and Kirknaes until, finally, they considered one sufficiently "original" to purchase, whereupon Mpagua absented himself for months, only to appear at their door carrying a bag filled with pieces identical to the one they had bought. Years after Kirknaes and Korn had left Kihaba, Mpagua wrote to request that they send him a new copy of their book, which had become badly worn through his use of it for presentation to tourists as an order catalogue.

Rashidi bin Mohamed was clearly the sculptor of greatest interest to the authors. By Korn's account, Mohamed was a temperamental, tragic figure. He was inspired to sculpt by dreams and was very productive in the first years that Kirknaes and Korn knew him. After being arrested for fighting with a fishmonger who refused to sell fish to him because he was a Mozambican, Kirknaes and Korn saw Mohamed only periodically, when he would appear suddenly at their home with sculptures for sale. After leaving Kihaba, they learned that he had died in 1974 in desperate poverty, not having established a lasting relationship with the patron to whom they had introduced him. Kirknaes's photo of Mohamed's self portrait--a figure of a weary old man embracing the overwhelming burden of a block of ebony wood that he is carrying home from the forest--provides a haunting epitaph.

The story that Korn tells of trying to visit Mohamed at his home, only to find that no one in the neighborhood had heard of the sculptor, prompts the reader to question how well the authors knew the artists whose work they celebrate. Kirknaes and Korn attempt to situate these sculptures in historical and cultural context, but in doing so they rely heavily on the literature and betray ignorance of recent historical and ethnographic research done on and in the area. Kirknaes's first chapter, "The Makonde," glosses the differences between the Makonde of Mozambique and the Makonde of Tanzania, and often confuses the practices and linguistic terms of one, or both, with those of other ethnic groups in Tanzania. Kirknaes speaks as if that which he observed in the 1960s holds true today, as when, for example, he suggests that Makonde men still hold secret from women the truth that mapiko dancers are masked humans and not spirits. There are numerous inaccuracies in his treatment of Makonde social organization. Kirknaes's second chapter, "Sculpture--Tradition and Innovation," provides a brief history of the emergence of ebony wood sculpting among the Makonde, including a discussion of patronage and the key genres, but this chapter too contributes little to the existing literature.

The works that Kirknaes and Korn visually present to their readers are mostly of the genre referred to as shetani, derived, they tell us, from "the people's myths about the strange creatures of the African fauna." Even as the authors provide captions conveying artists' descriptions of the works, they fail to adequately contextualize these captions. In the text, they even assert that shetani can be found around the world, among peoples as diverse as upper Paleolithic Europeans and contemporary Australian Aborigines. As a consequence, the subjects of these works are rendered more exotic and mysterious to readers.

Notwithstanding these shortcomings, Kirknaes and Korn have produced a book that extends their contribution to the celebration of Makonde sculpture in their insistence on contextualizing the works presented. What is more, the images of these sculptures are of very high quality. In addition to providing photos of ebony sculptures, the book beautifully documents people in their daily lives--a woman fetching water, another working in her fields--and initiation rites, including a series of images depicting preparations for a mapiko dance. Kirknaes's photos of the sculptor Kashimiri Matayo cutting down an mpingo (ebony) tree and sculpting a piece of root wood, and his image of a group of sculptors at work beneath an enormous mango tree, are remarkable.

In A Host of Devils, Zachary Kingdon also seeks to provide historical and cultural context for the shetani genre of Makonde ebony wood sculpture. His grasp of the literature is far greater than that of Kirknaes and Korn. The summary chapter on Makonde history and culture is generally well balanced and accurate although, given Kingdon's reliance in this section on the research of others, not as closely cited as it should be. His reading of the literature and his field data sometimes misses the mark on issues pertaining to life on the southern side of the Rovuma River--for example, he tends to speak of "the Makonde" as a cohesive group in reference to periods that predate the emergence of such a collective sense of identity; and he neglects almost completely to talk about the influence of FRELIMO nationalism and socialism on Makonde society in both Mozambique and Tanzania. Kingdon makes up for these lapses, however, with valuable contributions to our understanding of the historical experience of life among Mozambican Makonde migrants to Tanzania. His account of migrant workers' lives on colonial sisal plantations is particularly interesting.

Kingdon's historical summary of the emergence of ebony sculpting is also well crafted. While the sculptors agree that Nyakenya Nang'undu--who lived just north of the town of Mueda, on the Mueda Plateau, in northern Mozambique--was the first Makonde to carve nonutilitarian objects for sale, the practice of carving flourished among Makonde who migrated to Tanganyika in the late colonial period to escape Mozambique's harsh colonial labor regime. Kingdon discusses the critical role played by regional Christian missions, colonial merchants, and, finally, FRELIMO and international organizations sympathetic to the nationalist cause. He draws, in part, on a series of interviews he conducted in 1992 with the merchant Mohamed Peera, the most celebrated patron of Makonde sculpture.

Kingdon also provides a thorough historical synopsis of the emergence of the various genres of Makonde carving, from naturalistic figures to Christian icons, from "ujamaa" unity towers to the abstract mawingu form. Like Kirknaes and Korn, however, he focuses on the shetani genre. Readers will surmise that his discussion of shetani is much better researched. Not only does he tell in detail the story of the genre's birth with the seminal work of Samaki Likankoa--master to Dastan Nyedi, with whom Kingdon studied--he also provides ethnographically grounded perspectives on the disparate meanings of various categories of shetani that appear in Makonde sculpture.

Kingdon's work constitutes a quantum leap in the study of Makonde sculpture not only because of his extensive research in the field--sixteen months between 1990 and 1992--but also because he structured his interaction with Makonde carvers as an apprenticeship during which he learned to sculpt. Kingdon's account of this process makes for fascinating reading. He tells us that his mentor--Hendrick Thobias, of Ziwani, in Mtwara--accepted him as a student with greater ease than he might have accepted him as an ethnographer. On the first day, the master carver introduced him to the tools of Makonde carving, which Kingdon describes as only a user of such tools could. Thobias then had Kingdon watch as he sculpted a work from start to finish. In subsequent days and weeks, the master had his student take on carefully circumscribed tasks. Eventually Kingdon was doing most of the carving, with Thobias stepping in from time to time to gently redirect the flow of his work.

Not only does Kingdon provide photos of the works that he and Thobias completed together, he also provides photos that demonstrate the bodily dispositions of carvers at work--dispositions that he himself came to experience and appreciate first hand. Kingdon shares with his readers how, when sculpting, he interrogated his work and adapted his posture and grip on his tools and his carvings until, ultimately, he was able to discover the "bodily attitudes" that accorded with the dynamics of each of the "sculptural problems" confronting him.

In a paper that Stacy Sharpes and I presented at the Eleventh Triennial Meetings of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association in April of 1998 (published in African Arts, Fall 2002), we praised Kingdon's doctoral thesis (completed in 1994) as a benchmark in the study of Makonde carving. Sharing our paper with Kingdon in 1999, we presented him with a question that his thesis had raised for us. In it he not only emphasizes that spirits constitute the principal subject of shetani sculpture but also suggests that spirit possession can be understood as a trope for the act of carving. As nearly all Makonde carvers originate in Mozambique, and as spirit possession has been, until quite recently, unfamiliar to Makonde residents of Mozambique, we asked if some pieces in the shetani genre might not better be interpreted in relation to sorcery, with which Mozambican Makonde have long been more intimately familiar.

Where we suggested that Makonde of Mozambican origin in Tanzania might have drawn on the cosmologies of the people among whom they found themselves living, Kingdon has provided powerful evidence of this in A Host of Devils. He and his informants converse largely in Swahili, and their cosmological references reach even beyond the boundaries of Tanzania and Mozambique. (Where Mozambican Makonde also have little familiarity with or fear of "blood-sucking" entities, images of "blood-sucking" creatures abound in Kirknaes and Korn's volume.) Kingdon now recognizes that the founder of the shetani genre, Samaki Likankoa, "was open to the cultural traditions he encountered on the coast," and that these traditions may have served as cosmological references in his work.

At the same time, Kingdon tells us that Likankoa and his cohort feared that the financial success they achieved through carving might give rise to accusations of sorcery. What is more, Kingdon now seems more attuned to references to sorcery in the works of Makonde carvers, including, especially, the theme of mandandosho--sorcerers' zombie slaves. Dastan Nyedi's "Mama Ndizi" (Banana Woman), depicted in the book, is among the most striking examples. Though Kingdon does not mention this, in Mueda at least, sorcerers are said to replace with banana trees the bodies of those they turn into mandandosho; unsuspecting family members mistake these banana trees for their deceased relatives and bury them.

Finally, Kingdon has adopted and expanded the point we made that the work of sculptors, including Likankoa, accords in essential ways with the work of Muedan healers (vantela) insofar as both articulate visions of a world invisible to the ordinary person--visions that may carry within them moral reprimands. I find more persuasive Kingdon's revised argument that sculpting provides its Makonde practitioners with a means of challenging and transcending the perspectives and positions of others, be they "foreigners" such as the patrons and buyers of their works, ordinary Muedans, or even fellow sculptors. Kingdon offers in support of this idea the example of a sculpture produced by Hendrick Thobias soon after Thobias saw animated car toons for the first time in the home of a European patron; through their work, he suggests, Makonde carvers are able to "mediate or pre-empt the forces of subjugation and alienation" with which they are confronted.

Kingdon contends that what shetani figures ultimately "accomplish" is an "astonishing disclosure of a frightening ontological incompleteness" that resonates with "the unresolved, incomplete nature of personhood." Where previously Makonde ruminated on the incompleteness of personhood through tattooing their bodies, Kingdon asserts, some now do so through sculpting ebony wood--a substance that he argues has been intertwined with a Makonde sense of personhood since the time when women (and occasionally men) adorned themselves with ebony lip-plugs.

Jesper Kirknaes and Jorn Korn struggled decades ago to ensure recognition for Makonde art against forces such as a Tanzanian elite who they assert was embarrassed by its "primitive" themes. Eventually, images of Makonde art, provided by Kirknaes himself, would be printed on a Tanzanian bank note and on a Tanzanian stamp. The sculptors of the generation among whom Zachary Kingdon has worked aspire to represent themselves to the world. Dastan Nyedi dreamed of building a museum to house his own works rather than selling them to those who would carry them away. Like the persons upon whom the works of Nyedi and his colleagues often reflect, Nyedi's museum project, Kingdon informs us, remains incomplete.

HARRY G. WEST is an assistant professor of anthropology in the Graduate Faculty at the New School University. He has conducted research in Mozambique since 1991.