Kalashnikovs no longer call the shots in Maputo

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.