Sculpting New Economies: Mainland Art and Commerce in the Precolonial East African/Indian Ocean World

Makonde art and woodcarving is now world-famous and first became popular in Europe during the colonial era when missionaries in Tanzania and Mozambique encountered local artisans. For Makonde communities in both colonies, the colonial era brought new interest in African art as a commodity as well as new economic desires, currencies, and networks. However, what was the significance of regional artistic economies in earlier pre-colonial times? What artistic styles did earlier inhabitants of this region pursue? This paper presents early research from a new project exploring artistic economies among Makonde and Macua communities in earlier times. Linguistic evidence drawn from this author’s ongoing research provides a window into local choices and regional artistic interactions. The art itself – in its themes and the terminologies used locally to describe it – offers an additional perspective on how certain communities viewed the changes of this era. Instead of its postcolonial role as a vibrant form of ‘ethnic’ art, I propose that there was widespread artistic and aesthetic interaction among artists of this central East African region in earlier times. Rather than being a distinctive form of one particular language group, artists and consumers promoted a set of regionally distinctive styles that represented, for some, a popular alternative to Indian Ocean wide trends.