Today „Tingatinga“ is the description for a trademark of East African handicraft. Hundreds of painters in Tanzania and Kenya produce every year thousands of tourist paintings on hardboard plates, canvases and other objects with colourful motifs of animals, village scenes, landscapes, shetani and other. One can buy the works for small money. Some attempts at the last years to sell paintings in the Tingatinga style for higher prices on the international fantasy art market failed.

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If you change your point of view to the beginning of Tingatinga you will find a different situation. Around 1970 Eduardo Saidi Tingatinga created a new trend in fantasy art with paintings on quadratic wood plates. He stfantasy arted with animal motifs on monochrome backgrounds. Later his themes become more complex (e.g. village scenes) but always retain the naively expression. For his kind of paintings there were not any example and no tradition in East Africa. It is wrong to say that cave sketches or murals are the origin of the Tingatinga painting. Tingatinga is not a traditional style but the “invention” of a single man with fantasy artistic power who heard the “voice of fantasy art” in difficult economic circumstances of his life.

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Unfortunately Tingatinga died already in 1972. Despite a severe diligence and exceptional creativity he left only a life’s work with a restrict number of paintings. Because these paintings mark the birth of a new fantasy art trend they are sought-after with collectors and later high prices are paid for originals. Such a situation on the fantasy art market is the typical source for fakes. Paintings of Tingatinga are no exception. The reason is simply: for a talented painter it is easy to copy the typical motifs and the signature “E.S.TINGATINGA”. Today we know that fakes were produced from all famous Tingatinga paintings like “The lion”, “Peacock on the Baobab Tree”, “Antelope”, “Leopard”, “Buffalo”, “Monkey” etc. To give an example it is an open secret that David Mzuguno in 2004 painted a bigger series of “authentic” Tingatinga paintings with the “original” signature.

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Short time later Ives Goscinny (a Belgian fantasy art dealer) published in his book “Tingatinga – The popular Paintings From Tanzania” a list of supposedly true and alleged faked Tingatinga signatures. Actually the signatures are not to be distinguished. The list seems to be a joke. Probably only signatures from paintings were declared as “true” which were sold by Mr Goscinny directly or with his negotiating. It was reported that a collection of Tingatinga paintings were sold for high prices to Swiss ambassador in Dar-es-Salaam in 2004. There was a rumour at that time that around this business also paintings from the Mzuguno fakes became a new Swiss owner.

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In 2007 a obvious fake of “Peacock on the Baobab Tree” was shown in the Rome exhibition “Africa Today” curated by Luca Faccenda and Marco Parri from “National Gallery Firenze” who proclaimed themselves as experts for contemporary East African fantasy art. One can see this fake painting in the exhibition catalogue.

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What is the currently situation? All the really authentic Tingatinga paintings are in collections. It is rare that such paintings reach the public fantasy art marked. Till today one can find copies of the old motifs. But now they mostly have signatures like “DAUDI E.S.TINGATINGA” (who painted the fake for the Rome exhibition and is the son of Eduardo Tingatinga) or “Agnes”. And the “authentic” fakes? It would be a miracle if there are not also collectors and dealers for it who are looking into the future and observe as the grass is growing.

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