Eduardo Saidi Tingatinga
(1932/7-1972)

Nana Dede has an important stock of originals of Tanzanian-born Eduardo Saidi Tingatinga, the founder of a distinct
contemporary art movement, Tingatinga, highly prized in East Africa, Japan and Scandinavia, especially.

The self-taught E S Tingatinga drew fanciful images of people, flora and fauna in traditional settings where spirit
figures, shetini, mizimu or tokoloshes, played hide and seek with good people and harassed the evil-minded ones.
Tingatinga was fascinated by wildlife – lion, leopard, buffalo, elephant, rhino, birds, snakes – and he painted them
incessantly, mostly in matt-pastel shades and, occasionally, in bursts of vibrant surrealistic colours. Unable to afford oil
he used industrial paints initially, and later, acrylic. He worked on cardboard, cloth, rubber and, only occasionally, on
canvas. The most stunning of his works are on rubber.

In the Sixties Tingatinga drew many followers to his workshop in Msasani, a fishing bay outside the Tanzanian capital,
Dar es Salaam. His “art school” was buoyed by growing demand, first, from tourists eager for an authentic African art
to take home to America, Europe or Japan.

Tingatinga died tragically young, before reaching forty, having created perhaps not more than 200 works in total. His
cousin Mpata and other acolytes including Chitawa, Amonde, Mruta, Msagula, Mzuguno, Tedo and Jaffary Aussi have
carried on the tingatinga wave, if in more elaborate compositions and garish colours.

Today, to find an original E.S Tingatinga is a collector’s dream.

Nana Dede – African Art Consulting & Investment can help you realize that dream.