He painted for only four years, yet founded a tradition: few artists in history have given their name to an entire school with so little time.
Edward Saidi Tingatinga (1932, Namochelia, Tunduru District, southern Tanzania - 1972, Dar es Salaam) was born near the Mozambican border to a Makua mother and a Ngindo father, in the same high plateau region that produced the great Makonde sculptural tradition. He grew up in a rural world, without formal schooling, working as a labourer in the sisal fields of the Tanga region before moving in the 1950s to Dar es Salaam, where he found employment as a gardener for a British colonial official and later as a ward attendant at the Muhimbili Hospital, while relatives worked for embassies and international organizations: environments in which he observed house painters at work with commercial paints and hardboard.
Around 1968, encouraged by the ease with which Congolese painters sold their pictures to tourists along the roadsides of the newly independent capital, Tingatinga tried his hand at painting with the only materials within his reach: dregs of bicycle enamel and household paint on recycled masonite ceiling squares, typically sixty by sixty centimetres. Out of poverty he forged a style: fantastic animals and birds, flat and two-dimensional, set against plain monochrome grounds, outlined in bold black, each connected to a legend or saying of his Makua culture; village scenes and creatures of the savanna rendered with a directness, whimsy and chromatic exuberance that no academy could have taught. His paintings, cheerful and immediately recognizable, sold quickly to European residents and travellers; the National Arts Company of Tanzania took notice and began purchasing his work wholesale, and Tingatinga recruited members of his family and a first circle of followers to meet demand. His career lasted only four years: in 1972 he was shot dead by police in a tragic case of mistaken identity, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
His death did not end his art. His companions and family founded in his name the Tingatinga Arts Cooperative Society, formally recognized in 1990 and still active in Dar es Salaam, and the style he originated, which moved over time from masonite to enamel on canvas, became a school practised by generations of painters in Tanzania and Zanzibar, the visual emblem of the country and one of the most recognizable African art forms in the world; its brilliant enamel palette left its mark on artists including George Lilanga. The first international exhibition of Tingatinga painting was held posthumously at the National Museum of Copenhagen in 1974, followed over the decades by retrospectives and by the growing distinction, on the international market, between the rare originals of the founder and the vast production of the school. Original works by Edward Saidi Tingatinga are held in institutional collections including the British Museum, London, and continue to appear at international auction as testimonies of one of the most extraordinary founding stories in modern African art.