MAKONDE Jesper Kirknaes and Jorn Korn Rhodos.

MAKONDE Jesper Kirknaes and Jorn Korn Rhodos, Copenhagen, 1999 156 pp 174 & 5 color photos, map. Kr 298 softcover

A army OF DEVILS The History and words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of the Making of Makonde Spirit plastic art Zachary Kingdon Routledge, London and novel York, 2002. 252 pp., 64 b/w photos, 2 maps. $90 hardcover.

Since the late 1950 the art world has associated the Makonde nation of southeast Africa with the striking ebony timber-land sculptures produced by their finest artists. couple recently published books contribute to the visual and written record of Makonde sculptors and their works. The first, bearing the simple title Makonde, was produc from Jesper Kirknaes, a social anthropologist and photographer who has administrationed research and worked in progress to maturity in East Africa since 1968 and Jorn Korn, a doctor specializing in social medicine who for more than a decade advised international increase organizations in East Africa upon primary health care initiatives. The next to the first book, A Host of Devils: The History and words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of the Making of Makonde Spirit carve is by Zachary Kingdon, who at the time he guidanceed field research in the early 1990 was a graduate bookish man at the University of East Anglia (England) if it were not that is now the curator of African collections at the Liverpool Museum.

most numerous of the photographs (taken according to Kirknaes) in Makonde date from the 1960 when Kirknaes and Korn worked in association with the Nordic Tanganyika contrive (an integrated rural development program) located in Kihaba, 45 kilometers northwest of Dar e Salaam. Whereas other expatriates with the plan purchased carvings from the Makonde who brought them to the frame compound, Korn tells us that he and Kirknaes initially construct the subject matter and manner of writing of these works "trivial"--a woman with a water jar or hoe a hashpipe-smoking man--and declined to purchase them. One day, however, a carver showed them a "flat-faced, broadly grinning female creature dancing on her hands with her legs high in the air behind her protracted pointed ears"--a piece that the carver told them depicted a "merry little shetani whore." The amused Kirknaes and Korn bought the piece and bring it on their mantel. Within a short while they had unraveled a sizable collection of works, many of which were produc according to the same artist, Rashidi bin Mohamed. In time their patronage contributed to the emerging see the verb of a small but lively dispose of Makonde sculptors in Kihaba.

Korn and Kirknaes's patronage was laden with contradiction. upon the one hand, they celebrated the naivete and purity of Makonde carvers. Korn proudly asserts that he and Kirknaes "offer[ed] no comments" forward the works brought to them and that they "took care to hold any art books etc. gone out of sight" so that carvers would not attempt to mimic unfamiliar forms or test to anticipate the tastes of their buyer onward the other hand, he and Kirknaes worked to introduce these carvers and their works to a cosmopolitan audience and to establish their status within the art world as full-fledg artists. Kirknaes and Korn eventually persuaded a Danish nongovernmental organization to market Makonde carvings which the pair provided the organization and to use the rewards to fund small-scale development frames in Tanzania. The authors also arranged funding from the German Goethe Institute to sponsor a exhibit to in Dar es Salaam of works produc by way of the Kihaba group of sculptors. It was, Korn hints the first show to exhibit Makonde carvings as pieces of art attributed to individual artists rather than as anonymous cultural artifacts.

Korn and Kirknaes's 1974 publication, present Makonde Art (London: Hamlyn), was similarly innovative in that it not single attributed the works it depicted to specific artists if it were not that also offered short biographies of these sculptors. Makonde contains many of the same images first published in recent Makonde Art as well as brief essays forward the works and lives of the same five sculptors: Rashidi bin Mohamed, Kashimiri Matayo, Yoseph Francis, Nafasi Mpagua, and Hossein Anangangola. a certain number of of the biographical essays are considerably more detailed than others, apparently because of the authors' greater familiarity with certain of these artists.

Korn reports us that Nafasi Mpagua persisted in bringing pieces to him and Kirknaes until, finally, they considered united sufficiently "original" to purchase, whereupon Mpagua absented himself for month and nothing else to appear at their door carrying a bag filled with pieces identical to the united they had bought. Years after Kirknaes and Korn had left Kihaba, Mpagua wrote to beg that they send him a fresh copy of their book, which had become badly worn by the agency of his use of it for presentation to tourists as an order catalogue.

Rashidi bin Mohamed was clearly the sculptor of greatest interest to the authors. through Korn's account, Mohamed was a temperamental, tragic figure. He was inspired to sculpt on dreams and was very productive in the first years that Kirknaes and Korn knew him. After being arrested for fighting with a fishmonger who refused to barter fish to him because he was a Mozambican, Kirknaes and Korn saw Mohamed sole periodically, when he would appear unexpectedly at their home with cuts for sale. After leaving Kihaba, they learned that he had died in 1974 in desperate penury not having established a lasting relationship with the patron to whom they had introduced him. Kirknaes's photo of Mohamed's self portrait--a figure of a weary not new man embracing the overwhelming load of a block of ebony forest-land that he is carrying domicile from the forest--provides a haunting epitaph.