A children's book in the world of Tingatinga

Tingatinga painting is a modern art school with a history of its own. It goes back to Edward Saidi Tingatinga, who began to paint in Dar es Salaam at the end of the 1960s. He worked on square panels in strong colours and showed mainly animals but also people. His success got around, and young painters joined him. This is how the school arose, which soon had its centre in Msasani, a village near Dar es Salaam.

The paint used was bicycle paint, a glossy enamel, on hardboard. The material gives the pictures their opaque, glowing areas. Added to this are clear outlines and patterns inside the shapes: dots, stripes, swirls. That the paint looks almost like lacquer is part of the appearance.

Tingatinga died in 1972, and the school carried on. The Smithsonian Libraries summarise Yves Goscinny's book on the painting like this: the founder began in 1970 to train five pupils, namely Simon George Mpata, Tedo, Ajaba, Linda and Adeusi. This first generation trained a second, and the close circle around the founder opened up. According to the summary, a cooperative takes over sales and marketing, and the painting has become more varied.

The style has changed in the process. Tingatinga's own pictures were tidy and mostly showed a single animal. Later painters filled the free space with plants and further animals, and more recently city scenes and narrative pictures have been added. Our densely filled, heavily patterned look therefore corresponds more to the later generations of painters than to the early, sparing panels of the founder.

Our pictures are a present-day children's book adaptation and take over elements of this tradition freely: the strong outlines, the opaque colours, the patterns. The child by the forest river in our example picture and the characters in your book belong to this free adaptation. They do not come from Tingatinga painting itself.