Against the background of the carving’s beginnings at Konde in Kisarawe District, Tanzania, which attest to the crucial ties between Zaramo social practices and the carved objects that form an integral part of Zaramo life, The Art of the Zaramo presents the transformations, and reinvention of Zaramo wood sculpture in line with forces of modernization and social change. The book confirms that art represents history, culture and society. To find answers to the author’s questions and to develop an understanding of how Zaramo figurative sculpture was transformed as it went through modernization, Fadhili Safieli Mshana compelled to consider the impact of the following: Zaramo multiple ethnic heritage, social norms and cultural patterns including Swahili interactions, the strategic proximity of the Zaramo to Dar es Salaam (Tanzania’s biggest city and former capital), influences of Islam and Christian missionaries, colonial history, and finally the socio-economic transformation of post-independence Tanzania. These involve examining the ways that art acts as a vehicle for the formation of individual/group identity; how the two entities negotiate each other in the process of social and cultural change. This excellent book then, is about the Zaramo and their figurative wood carving tradition, and it is written as an attempt to not only understand the origins, development, and centrality of this figural carving tradition to the Zaramo, but also, the ways the Zaramo have used select sculptural objects to interpret change and continuity in the midst of modernization and social change.

African Artists under Mission Patronage explores relationships between African artists and Western Christian missions in twentieth-century Africa, and how that patronage has shaped and defined twentieth-century African art.

The Art of Connection narrates the individual stories of artisans and traders of Kenyan arts and crafts as they overcome the loss of physical access to roadside market space by turning to new digital technologies to make their businesses more mobile and integrated into the global economy. Bringing together the studies of globalization, development, art, and communication, the book illuminates the lived experiences of informal economies and shows how traders and small enterprises balance new risks with the mobility afforded by digital technologies. An array of ethnic and generational politics have led to market burnings and witchcraft accusations as Kenya’s crafts industry struggles to adapt to its new connection to the global economy. To mediate the resulting crisis of trust, the Fair Trade sticker and other NGO aesthetics continue to successfully represent a transparent, ethical, and trusting relationship between buyer and producer. Dillon Mahoney shows that by balancing revelation and obfuscation—what is revealed and what is not—Kenyan art traders make their own roles as intermediaries and the exploitative realities of the global economy invisible.

As an urban anthropologist, pastor and teacher the author has lived for many years among the Zaramo. This revised doctoral thesis is an important and well documented study of the traditional healers in the urban setting.