Lusona, Chokwe sand drawings
Lusona, dibujos en arena cokwe
- Date
- documentados desde el s. XIX (origen anterior) · confidence low
- Place
- Upper Zambezi, Moxico, Angola
- Credited to
- Chokwe (Tchokwe) people
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
Drawings traced with a finger in the sand following a continuous line around a grid of dots, illustrating proverbs and stories. Paulus Gerdes analysed them as geometry and graph theory: tracing algorithms, symmetries and Eulerian-circuit structures.
The corpus was collected in the 19th-20th centuries (José Redinha, 1940-60) and Gerdes theorised it in the 1990s; it is unknown how much is earlier or whether the tracing algorithms were conscious.
What it led to
- research in African ethnomathematics (Gerdes)
- mnemonics for narratives and initiation rituals
- teaching mathematics with cultural patterns