TingaTinga legacy lives on in art

The brush, not more than a few hairs, disappears briefly in the white, thick colour. Sarange sits on his blue plastic chair and stirs in the colour. He pulls out the brush, carefully takes away some colour, bends over his work and draws calmly as he concentrates on the canvas.

The filigrane white lines symbolise jewelry on the feet and wrists of the Maasai women Sarange painted on a red-yellow background earlier that week. Sarange has only a small table for his few utensils: a wide brush for painting larger surfaces like backgrounds or large elements, two 0.5 cm wide brushes for rough structures, a few pencils and a fine brush for contours and details. Sarange, full-name Ramadhani Omari Sarange, paints because his brother has inspired him. And he seems to forget the world around him for the moment, while he adds new elements to his pieces of art.

Every day, Sarange sits on his blue plastic chair and draws from 8:00 am until 6:00 pm. He is part of the Tingatinga Arts Cooperative Society (TACS) in Oysterbay, where he works, and he is not only inspired because of his brother, but also because of Tingatinga.

“Tingatinga is the only Tanzanian Art. Tingatinga is from here,” Gregory Mchopa says. He is another artist working outside TACS. “I like painting Tingatinga, because it is unique to Tanzania,” he adds. In the city centre, 28-year-old Daniel Kamalamo and Kevin Fortnaus are strolling around to find some customers. Both are street-artists. Kevin has been drawing for two years while Daniel has been in the trade for ten years already. “Art is our life, we do it with our heart,” he says, and continues, “People are proud to work in the Tingatinga-style of art, because it is authentic Tanzanian.”

Short life as an artist

Many think that Tingatinga is just a name for a particular style of drawing. But actually it is the name of the “inventor” of Tingatinga, Edward Saidi Tingatinga. Between 1968 and 1972, he used to sit in the shade of his small hut in Msasani, drawing figures he remembered from his childhood in Mindu, near the village of Nakapanya in South of Tanzania, where he was born in 1932 and grew up too. According to the recently published book, “A Concise Study on Contemporary Art in Tanzania”, Tingatinga himself never had any education or training on painting, but saw the opportunity to sell pictures on the street, as other artists did already. He just went to the next shop, bought some colour and the 3 mm-thick compressed hardboard panels, commonly used to cover the ceiling.

With some brushes and enamel paint, he started to draw. After some three years, Tingatinga was pretty well known and made his living from painting only.

It was an ordinary yet a little rainy Wednesday night in May 1972 in Dar es Salaam as the police was controlling car-drivers for their licenses, standing at the clock-tower roundabout, towards Samora Avenue – which was back in 1972 known as Independence Avenue, when things changed.

That night seemed a little different; one driver who was asked to stop panicked and drove around the policeman, almost hit the police patrol car and sped away. The policemen first fired a warning pistol shot into the air and then, as the car still did not stop, aimed at the tires. Stray bullets killed one of the occupants and slightly injured another. The third man was not harmed. The dead man, 40 years of age, slight beard on his chin, had been been a people person. The had police accidentally shot Tingatinga, whose still very young career as an artist and leading figure in the Tingatinga-movement came to an abrupt end.

The art prevailed

But the sudden death of Tingatinga did not mark the end of his famous style. The master himself had educated five students - all of them close friends and family members on his way of drawing. After the first turmoil in 1972, Tingatinga-painters of the first generation were participating in December of the same year at an international exhibition in London to show ‘Tanzania Folk Paintings’. In the coming years the community grew, as the five first-generation-artists started to educate other people. In 1977, the Tingatinga Partnership had been established, an organisation to further formalise the group. Thirteen years later, the Tingatinga Arts Cooperative Society (TACS) had been founded and in 1997 finally the TACS-Centre beside the Morogoro-stores in Oysterbay was opened.

Tingatinga is said to be very popular amongst children. And it is, due to its simple forms and bright colours also said to be naive art. But this is only half the truth; within the last decades, the style of Tingatinga has been developing. In particular, it was due to a row of very skilled and determined artists, who did further elaborate the ideas and principles Edward Saidi Tingatinga had.

In the 90s, some started to use canvas instead of the ceiling-board, because it would be easier to transport. Others started to draw more complex pictures; while Tingatinga himself put more emphasis on animal figures, now one can find very busy paintings showing scenes in the City of Dar es Salaam or vast and colourful jungle-scenes. But one thing has remained constant; Tingatinga remains as the style of simple figures, bright colours and often a rather abstract expression.

But there is Business

There is another dimension: Art is considered art if there is a market for the paintings. If you find an audience big and solvent enough to pay, any expression is art. If there is no such thing as a wide audience, it is only marginal art. And it seems to be difficult for Artists like Gregory Mchopa or Sarange, to access the better markets. Gregory says: ”We need a significant market. But for now, most of our paintings are bought by foreigners. Local people hardly know or recognise our work.” he says, standing between hundreds of images of different styles in a small and barely enlightened shop besides the Morogoro stores. Daniel Kamalamo, a street-artist, calls it business-Art. “To make a living, we have to draw what people like to buy,” he says. These are the well-known and similar looking scenes of the Maasai - either herding cattle, going to fetch water, preparing for a fight, hunting, or standing in a row. Or as another, unnamed street artist in Dodoma once said: “I know that ‘mzungus’ like the village scenes the most. And this is what we are providing you.“ He was offering pieces of art of Maasai-warriors or village-scenes, abstractly drawn with a pallet-knife, which looked nice, but not very different to those you find elsewhere.

While precarious economic situations force artists to do the same; sell pictures over and over again, the process of the making them, especially for Tingatinga, is something like a social movement.

According to the study, new artists were expressing their view on the society and were showing the excessively constraining form of administrative, political and judicial framing of people’s natural freedom. Furthermore, drawing Tingatinga is for the artists in TACS – a collective action, as the painters do continuously influence and copy each other, because they are painting together. One could say this is lack of fantasy. It is causing hundreds of pictures that look almost the same. But on the other hand, it makes Tingatinga art a collective work, while the style remains surprisingly pure. Although Tingatinga himself did not share his knowledge with more than five people, nowadays nobody really owns the right for the distinctive Tingatinga-pattern: his style and art is a collective property and even a vehicle for social change. And the style is also used to tell African fairytales as cartoons on social media like YouTube.