Makonde people

The Makonde are an ethnic group in southeast Tanzania, northern Mozambique, and Kenya. The Makonde developed their culture on the Mueda Plateau in Mozambique. At present, they live throughout Tanzania and Mozambique and have a small presence in Kenya. The Makonde population in Tanzania was estimated in 2001 to be 1,140,000, and the 1997 census in Mozambique put the Makonde population in that country at 233,358, for an estimated total of 1,373,358. The ethnic group is roughly divided by the Ruvuma River; members of the group in Tanzania are referred to as the Makonde, and those in Mozambique as the Maconde. The two groups have developed separate languages over time but share a common origin and culture.

The Makonde successfully resisted predation by African, Arab, and European slavers. They did not fall under colonial power until the 1920s. During the 1960s, the revolution which drove the Portuguese out of Mozambique was launched from the Makonde homeland of the Mueda Plateau. For a time, the revolutionary movement FRELIMO derived some of its financial support from the sale of Makonde carvings and the group became the backbone of the revolutionary movement. The Maconde of Mozambique, due to their role in the resistance to Portuguese colonial rule, remain an influential group in the politics of the country. Many speak other languages such as English in Tanzania, Portuguese in Mozambique, and Swahili and Makua in both countries. In Makonde rituals, when a girl becomes a woman, Muidini is the best dancer out of the group of girls undergoing the rituals.

Some Makonde people from Mozambique had relocated to Kenya in the 1950s. Early in the 21st century, efforts began to obtain Kenyan identity cards to allow the Makonde to exercise their rights and privileges as Kenyan citizens. In 2016, a group of 300 Makonde people trekked from Kwale to Nairobi.

The Makonde people regard wood as a crucial part of their cultural and spiritual lives, as it is a basic material in daily life, but also in creative practice. Traditionally, wood has been used for the building of houses, to carve ritual figures and masks for initiation rites, and to create sculptures of fertility and lineage. In these functions, wood became conceptualized in terms of Makonde ideas of liveliness, creation, and ties or connecting linkages between worlds or spaces, here, the physical and spiritual. Traditionally, wood is a material that the Makonde would carve ritual devices, figures, and masks, household objects, when that art was commandeered after the 1930s to become an important part of the contemporary art of Africa. The most internationally recognized was George Lilanga.