Painter and poet · Mozambique
Malangatana Ngwenya
Malangatana Valente Ngwenya (1936–2011) was a Mozambican painter and poet and the country's best-known artist. His crowded, visionary paintings mix village life, spirits and violence; he was imprisoned by the Portuguese secret police in the 1960s, and in 1997 UNESCO named him an Artist for Peace.
Updated 3 min read
From Matalana to the city
Malangatana was born in 1936 in Matalana, a village in southern Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony. He went to mission school, moved to Lourenço Marques — today's Maputo — and worked as a ball boy at a members' tennis club while studying at night and painting. Two members of the club, Augusto Cabral and the architect Pancho Guedes, encouraged him.
His work was shown in public for the first time in a group exhibition in 1959. His professional career began in 1960, when Pancho Guedes, who is credited with his move into full-time art, gave him a studio and bought his paintings. His first solo exhibition followed in 1961.
What the paintings look like
A Malangatana painting is crowded to its edges: figures with wide eyes and bared teeth, animals, masks and spirits pressed together in strong reds, blues and yellows. The scenes draw on the stories, rituals and fears of village life, on colonial violence and, later, on war. They are disturbing and celebratory at once.
How to look at a Malangatana: begin at the edges, where the crowd presses in, and work towards the centre. Faces, teeth and eyes repeat across the surface so that no single figure dominates, and the colour is laid in strong flat areas, so the picture reads as one mass of bodies before it breaks into individual characters. Then look for the calmer passages, which give the violence its scale. That reading is this site's own.
He also wrote poetry, and his words and images share the same intensity. His poems were published in the journal Black Orpheus and in the anthology Modern Poetry from Africa in 1963.
Prison
In 1964, according to one source, the PIDE, Portugal's political police, arrested Malangatana for his involvement with the independence movement FRELIMO. Sources differ on the length of his imprisonment: one says eighteen months, another about two years. The work he made around that time forms an important core of his early output.
Murals and public work
In 1971 a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation took him to Portugal to study printmaking and ceramics, and he returned to Mozambique just before independence. After Mozambique's independence in 1975, Malangatana became a public figure: he painted large murals in Maputo and took part in many cultural and community projects, and from 1990 until the first multiparty elections he was a FRELIMO deputy. In September 1997 he painted a fresco during a UNESCO conference on the culture of peace held in Maputo, and the same year UNESCO named him an Artist for Peace. He died on 5 January 2011 in Matosinhos, Portugal, and his paintings are held in collections in Mozambique, Portugal and beyond.
Where to see the work
Tate lists him on its artist pages, and the Richard Saltoun Gallery in London lists him among its artists; the museums and galleries of Maputo and of Portugal hold the largest groups of his work, so ask them what is on view. His public murals in Maputo are the other place to look, though we have not confirmed which survive.
Related artists and music
Malangatana and Esther Mahlangu are the best-known southern African artists of their generation to draw directly on local forms. In northern Mozambique, Makonde carvers created another great modern tradition: see Makonde art. Readers interested in the wider Portuguese-speaking world of African culture should continue with semba, Angola's urban song, and morna from Cabo Verde. Compare his political imprisonment with that of the Sudanese modernist Ibrahim El-Salahi, jailed a decade later. See our list of Mozambican artists.
