From three-dimensional figures the shetani became painted protagonists: tradition and modernity intertwined in a language accessible to the whole world.
George Lilanga (1934, Kikwetu, Masasi District, Tanzania - 2005, Dar es Salaam) was born into the Makonde people on the high plateaus along the Tanzania-Mozambique border, a region celebrated for its mapiko initiation dances and its great tradition of ebony sculpture. Trained in carving from a young age within his family, he began his formal path as a sculptor in 1961. His life changed in the early 1970s with his move to Dar es Salaam, where he joined Nyumba ya Sanaa, the House of Art founded by Sister Jean Pruitt: hired at first as a night guard, he became the centre's most inventive presence, creating its painted doors and more than one hundred stucco friezes, and finding there the freedom to carry the Makonde tradition beyond sculpture, into painting, etching, batik and work on goatskin.
His protagonists remained the shetani, the unruly spirits of Makonde cosmology: distorted, playful figures with wide eyes, large ears and dancing bodies, which Lilanga translated from ebony into two dimensions, crowding every corner of his compositions. The encounter with the Tingatinga school gave him the brilliant enamel palette and luminous grounds of his mature work, while the density of his scenes echoes the Makonde ujamaa, the tree of life that signifies unity and solidarity. Animated by caricature and keen social critique, his art portrays Tanzanian everyday life with an irony that is both affectionate and unsparing, marking a revolution in the emergence of individual artistic voice in East Africa.
International recognition came early: in a 1970s collective exhibition of African artists in Washington D.C., around one hundred of the two hundred and eighty works shown were his, prompting comparisons with Jean Dubuffet, and Keith Haring later acknowledged Lilanga's influence on his own work. In the 1980s he attended the Salzburg Summer Academy, adding etching to his repertoire. In 1995, invited to Hiroshima for the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombing, he created the five monumental "Hiroshima Shetani" for the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. Despite the diabetes that late in life cost him both legs, he worked until his death, returning in his final years to sculpture in brightly painted wood. His work featured in the defining surveys of contemporary African art, including "Africa Remix" (2004-2007), "African Art Now: Masterpieces from the Jean Pigozzi Collection" (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2005), "Arts of Africa" (Grimaldi Forum, Monaco, 2005), "100% Africa" (Guggenheim Bilbao, 2006), "Why Africa?" (Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, Turin, 2007) and "Africa? Una nuova storia" (Complesso del Vittoriano, Rome, 2009-2010). In Italy, where his fortune has always been strongest, his work has been presented by Antonella Pisilli in "L'Africa nei loro occhi" (Viterbo, 2010), "Africam EXPLORO" (2023) and the tribute exhibition "Shetani, Spirits and Other Stories: George Lilanga. The Return of a Forgotten Genius" (Black Liquid Art Gallery, 2025), marking the twentieth anniversary of his death. His works are held in the Jean Pigozzi Contemporary African Art Collection and form the backbone of the Hamburg Mawingu Collection, while his Nyumba ya Sanaa friezes are preserved in Tanzania under the National Arts Council (BASATA).