Makonde Shetani Figure
The shetani carvings of the Makonde are dark hardwood figures of contorted, expressive spirits, carved from the ebony-like mpingo of the Tanzanian and Mozambican coast. Beginning in the 1950s, carvers turned from ancestor figures to the shetani, capricious bush and ancestral spirits, twisting human and animal forms into elongated, agonised, or playful shapes that seem to catch a spirit mid-transformation. Each carving is original, the forms said to be revealed to the carver in dreams, and the pieces are exhibited as art as much as ritual objects. The word shetani, from the Arabic for 'evil spi