Shetani (Makonde spirit sculpture)
Secular commercial blackwood sculpture style of distorted spirit-beings, originating among Makonde migrant carvers in 1950s Dar es Salaam; not a ritual object.
Shetani — from the Swahili for "spirit" or "devil" — is a secular commercial sculptural style that originated among Makonde migrant carvers in Dar es Salaam in the early 1950s. It is carved in dense mpingo (African blackwood, Dalbergia melanoxylon) and depicts abstracted, distorted spirit-beings with elongated limbs and exaggerated anatomy; the style is credited to the master carver Samaki Likankoa.
Shetani is the dominant Makonde form in the Western market and is frequently misrepresented as "traditional" or "ritual". Its blackwood-and-high-polish signature became so associated with "Makonde art" in general that it obscures the older and formally distinct ritual masquerade corpus of the lipiko helmet mask. Shetani and ujamaa (the "tree of life") are the two principal commercial forms (Kingdon 2002).