Migração makonde, produção de esculturas e mercado de arte no Tanganyika: a questão do estilo Shetani (1950-60)

Abstract

This article focuses on part of my PhD research that focused on makonde art production in dialogue with the political history of Mozambique between 1950 and 1974. The research of a interdisciplinary nature involved diverse sources such as the documentation produced in the colonial period as well as a bibliography accessed in different collections of Lisbon and in the Library of the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, besides oral reports collected in Mozambique between 2012 and 2014. These oral sources were produced, especially, in interviews and conversations with sculptors, who call their respective pieces as makonde art. This paper discusses the context of production of a specific sculpture style known as shetani, which was created in the neighboring Tanganyika (now Tanzania), in the late 1950s, by Samaki Likonkoa, artist makonde of Mozambique. I analyze this production in the context of the international migratory experience of the makonde from Mozambique to Tanganyika, motivated by the search for better conditions of work and life. The case of the production of this type of sculpture illustrates here the circulation of people, objects and knowledge between the south and the north of the Rovuma river in the Portuguese colonial context of the 1950s and 1960s.