A mural at the Centro de Estudos Africanos in Maputo by Malangatana Ngwenya.
As night falls on the terrace of the Piri-Piri bar and restaurant on 24th of July Street, patrons order another round of Laurentina, Maputo’s excellent draught beer, and boys with winning smiles measure out little mounds of roasted peanuts on napkins.
Hawkers gather at the edge of the terrace and unroll their batiks and Chinese-made “African” print textiles.
Behind them on an island in the middle of the busy street stand piles of wooden masks and regiments of carved figures.
Suddenly a man sprints past carrying four large, stretched canvases on his back.
Later that evening, he appears outside the Restaurant Monte Alentejano around the corner on Julius Nyerere Avenue.
He rests the canvases against a tree, then parades each one the length of the restaurant windows.
Inside, the people eating steamed clams with garlic and fresh coriander and drinking more Laurentina don’t look up at the paintings moving by.
After a while, the man gathers the canvases, hoists them on his back, and trots off into the night.
Not all artists in the lovely, tree-lined, laid-back capital of Mozambique have to go through such acrobatics to find a home for their work; several like Malagatana Valente Ngwenya, Naguib Elias Abdula, Estevao Mucavele, Gemuce (Pompilio Hilario), Jorge Dias, and Goncalo Mabunda have gained international reputations and clients.
Titos Mabota’s wire and cloth sculptures and the India ink drawings on shiny paper of Adelino Vasco Mendonca have been selected for Jean Pigozzi’s trend-setting Geneva-based Collection of Contemporary African Art.
But even Mabunda, who has earned international recognition for his sculptures made from discarded weapons as well as a slot in the acclaimed Africa Re-Mix travelling exhibition, said it is difficult for artists to find places to show and sell their work in Maputo.
So, on March 28, he opened his house on 1834 Karl Marx Avenue to the public to show his chair-thrones and figures made from AK-47s and spent mortar shells.
Also on display were the works of photographer Mauro Pinto, ceramic sculptor Reinata Sadimba and the multifaceted Idasse (Antonio Manuel Tembe), as well as those of several foreign artists living in the city.
“There are really no galleries here where artists can show, so we said, let’s try opening our house to shorten the distance between the viewer and the artists,” said Tina Lorizzo, an Italian artist and Mabunda’s girlfriend.
As is the case in many African countries, the cultural centres of several diplomatic missions in Mozambique serve as focal points for the plastic as well as the performing and musical arts.
Places like the Franco-Mozambican Cultural Centre, housed in a lovely old building that was once the Lourenco Marques Social Club in the Portuguese colonial era, the German Goethe Institut, and the Portuguese Instituto Camoes provide space and funding for exhibits by plastic artists in which installations seem to feature prominently.
But the shows are relatively infrequent and not reliable commercial outlets for the sale of art.
Brazil, another former Portuguese colony, also hosts important cultural centres in Mozambique and Angola.
Tembo Danca (Tembo Joao Sinanhal), a 28-year-old artist and a teacher at the National School of Visual Arts, established in 1983 to provide secondary school students with a general education in the visual arts, said Brazil has had a significant influence on the plastic arts in Mozambique, both in support of and training for local artists.
Some of the founders of the four-year-old MUVART, the Movement for Contemporary Art in Mozambique, studied in Brazil—and in Cuba, which, together with neighbouring South Africa, is another source of artistic influence.
“The colonial era diluted our culture, things like makonde sculpture. The Portuguese took over and introduced easel painting. We have seen Western art in books, and it has influenced our product; we are imitating what we have seen from the outside,” Danca said, echoing the concerns of many Mozambican artists.
“The batik and the makonde sculptures ended up being airport art — handicrafts—and it is now difficult to find people who know the old ways of doing things.”
This discourse was going on long before the emergence of an independent Mozambique in 1975 and featured prominently in discussions about the role of culture and art in the new Marxist-Leninist state two years later.
It even affected the opening of the small but impressive National Museum of Art in 1989.
“Was the art Mozambican, was it even art? They were so concerned about this issue that they couldn’t open the museum,” said Alda Costa, holder of the only doctorate in art history in Mozambique, and a researcher and curator who wrote the introduction to the museum in which she raised the prickly issue of the confluence of traditional and contemporary art.
“Today it’s not such a problem. There are more artists, and they have studied outside. Twenty years ago, art was a political issue,” she says
The Portuguese colony of Mozambique was formally established after the 1884-85 Congress of Berlin divided Africa up among European nations.
But it wasn’t until after World War II that large-scale Portuguese emigration to the colony was encouraged.
Although most of those who arrived in Mozambique and Angola were peasants or minor civil servants from the hardscrabble lands of northern Portugal, there were also doctors, lawyers, teachers and architects who formed a nascent intellectual class opposed to both the dictatorship of Antonio de Salazar in Portugal and the excesses of the colonial administration in Mozambique.
In 1936, members of this group established the Nucleo de Arte of Lourenco Marques, as the capital was then called, to encourage artistic creation and promote education in art.
New ideas and new forms of art started to emerge in the late 1950s and 1960s as local Africans began to spend time at the school and club.
Malagatana, perhaps Mozambique’s best-known artist, and Bertina Lopes, a remarkably versatile 85-year-old painter and sculptor, were among the first generation of African artists who came to represent the fusion of traditional and contemporary themes and styles.
“Starting in the 1960s in a more or less conscious manner, there was a growing concern about the loss of age-old artistic traditions, and efforts were made to support the local art and culture that had previously been dismissed,” Alda Costa wrote in Percursos e Olhares (Paths and Glimpses), an introduction to art in Mozambique recently published by the Portuguese School of Mozambique.
The morphing of traditional makonde sculpture from the Maconde Plateau in northern Mozambique and southern Tanzania into a new style called nnandenga, or shetani in Kiswahili, and the making of clay pottery and figures known as xikelekhedana are two traditions that have been resuscitated, encouraged and transformed into something new.
The highly personal ceramic figures made by Reinata Sadimba, a Makonde woman from the Cabo Delgado region on the Tanzanian border, are among the best examples of this.
It was to Malagatana, who had used his art and increasing international reputation as a weapon in the fight for independence, that Samora Machel, the first president of independent Mozambique, turned to take charge of the establishment of a museum for the new nation’s art — although this was to take another 14 years.
Mozambique may well be one of the few — if not the only — African nation that celebrated its independence with an Exposition of Popular Art, in search of a “new culture born of the creation of all and the creation of each one,” in the words of Frelimo, the Mozambican Liberation Front that ruled the country as a single-party state until 1990, when a new constitution introduced a multiparty system.
For Frelimo, art, both traditional and contemporary, was to be used to build the new nation, and out of this policy grew the making of public murals, a movement bolstered by the arrival of exiled Chilean artists after the overthrow of president Salvador Allende in September 1973.
Today, the artists who gather at the Nucleo de Arte don’t think much about political movements and grand causes.
They want to assert themselves as individuals and sell their art but acknowledge that the market — as is the case in many African countries — is made up primarily of foreigners temporarily residing in their country.
Azael Moyana, a writer on cultural affairs for the weekly Magazine Independente, expressed doubt that the forthcoming Second National Conference on Culture from May 18-21 (the first was held in July 1993) will have much to offer to young artists.
He’s concerned that most of the discussion will involve teachers and education officials talking about the role of culture in sustainable development, rather than about how to promote and sustain artistic creativity in a country where a tube of acrylic paint costs 300 metecais ($10.75).
Nhongwene Arturo Vicente, a 31-year-old painter from Zambezia province in the centre of the country, said he had spent more than five years as a child soldier with Renamo, the Mozambican National Resistance movement backed by apartheid South Africa and white-ruled Rhodesia in Mozambique’s brutal 12-year civil war that ended in 1992.
“I returned to school in 2000 and already knew I wanted to be a painter,” he said in the workspace at Nucleo. “I was looking for a way to express myself. But really, there is no market. But still, I’d rather please myself than have to give in to the expectations of a buyer; otherwise I would be doing airport art.”
Several of his abstract paintings are among those hanging in Nucleo’s exhibition space where the pricing seems arbitrary — work by a well-known painter is sometimes less expensive than that of a relative unknown. Without an active market, it is difficult to assign values to works of art.
Several of the Nucleo habitués took part in a workshop at the city’s Polytechnic University to raise funds through an auction of their paintings for disadvantaged children. Joao Paulo Bias, a painter who organised the workshop, wasn’t quite sure how the starting price would be set.
When interest was expressed in the two paintings he had done, and he was asked for a price, Jamal Carlos replied, “I don’t know. What do you want to pay?”
In Kenya, where art has never been seen as arm of ideology, the commercial aspect has taken hold without much difficulty. But the problem remains of establishing a market value for the merchandise in the absence of valid criticism and cultural arbitrators.
The April 8 auction of contemporary African (read mainly Nigerian) art at Bonham’s in London was an attempt, according to promoter Access Bank, to establish prices for the expanding market for Nigerian art, primarily among Nigerian expatriates.
Alda Costa and Jorge Dias, curator at the National Museum of Art and an artist himself, agree that because there is little or no commercial art activity in Maputo, it is difficult to set prices — and standards.
“Everything is all mixed up; we need writers and critics and philosophers,” said Mrs Costa, who is president of the board of the new High Institute of Art and Culture, the first tertiary institution of its kind in the country, expected to open its doors in August.
