Kalashnikovs no longer call the shots in Maputo

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.