Painting style · Tanzania
Tingatinga painting
Tingatinga is a popular painting style from Tanzania, created in Dar es Salaam in the late 1960s by Edward Saidi Tingatinga (1932–1972). Painted in glossy enamel on board, and later on canvas, with flat bright colours and bold outlines, it shows animals and birds and, later, crowded scenes of Swahili life. After Tingatinga's early death his students and relatives carried the style on, and it became one of East Africa's best-known art forms.
Published 3 min read
Edward Saidi Tingatinga
Edward Saidi Tingatinga was born in 1932 in the village of Namochelia, in the Tunduru District of southern Tanzania, near the border with Mozambique. Like many young men from the south, he went north to look for work, and eventually settled in Dar es Salaam, where he did a range of jobs.
Around 1968 he began to paint. Using enamel paint — the hard, glossy paint used for bicycles and houses — on squares of hardboard, he painted single animals and birds against plain backgrounds, in flat colours with strong outlines. He sold them near the Morogoro Stores in the Oyster Bay area of Dar es Salaam, where expatriates and visitors shopped, and his paintings quickly found buyers.
His career lasted only four years. In 1972 he was shot dead by police who mistook him for a criminal they were pursuing. He was about forty.
The style
A classic Tingatinga painting is:
- square, often around 60 centimetres a side, on board;
- glossy, because of the enamel paint, with colours straight from the tin;
- flat, with no perspective or shadow, and figures outlined in black or a strong contrasting colour;
- decorative, with dots, stripes and repeated patterns filling bodies and backgrounds.
The first subjects were animals — giraffes, elephants, leopards, birds, fish — often with a touch of humour. Later painters added busy scenes of village and town life, markets and celebrations, spirits and stories, sometimes crowding hundreds of small figures into a single picture.
Students and the cooperative
Before his death, Tingatinga had taught relatives and neighbours to paint, among them Simon George Mpata, January Linda, Omari Amonde, Adeusi Saidi Mandu and Casimiro Mkoleye. They kept the style alive after 1972 and taught others in turn. The painters later organised themselves as a partnership, which took the name Tingatinga Arts Cooperative Society in 1990. It is still based near the Morogoro Stores, where Tingatinga sold his first paintings, and has around fifty members.
From Dar es Salaam to the world
Tingatinga became one of the most recognisable art forms of East Africa, sold in Tanzania, Kenya and beyond and exhibited in Europe and Japan. In 2010 a children's animated series, Tinga Tinga Tales, made with animators in Nairobi, borrowed the style to retell African animal stories.
Buying a Tingatinga painting
Tingatinga is painted for the market, and quality varies enormously, from quick souvenirs to carefully painted works by established artists. Ask for the painter's name — good paintings are signed — and look for confident outlines, even, saturated colour and inventive composition. Buying at the cooperative in Dar es Salaam supports the painters directly. See also how to buy African art.
Related
Tingatinga is often compared with Congolese popular painting, another urban, self-taught style made for local and foreign buyers. In Dar es Salaam it grew up alongside the modern carving of the Makonde. For the region, see East African art.