An East African leguminous tree with dense black timber which is used for carvings and musical instruments.
Dalbergia melanoxylon, family Leguminosae
Example sentencesExamples
The group organises both large-scale replanting of the mpingo tree by community volunteers and youth education on conservation in primary and secondary schools.
The mpingo that I use to make my clarinets is from Mozambique, which is more reddish in color than Tanzanian mpingo.
Like ebony, mpingo is also a heavy, dense black hardwood, and it is plentiful in East Africa.
Various national measures have been taken to protect mpingo in countries where it occurs.
The GoodWood Campaign hopes to promote a tree nursery for each carver cooperative that will grow these alternative woods to halt the use of the scarce supply of mpingo left in Kenya.
Far from corrupting Makonde sculpting, the shift to mpingo - with its dense grain - allowed artists to advance their technical skills and to obtain finely detailed results.
Until recently, southern Tanzania was relatively isolated and its population of mpingo mostly unscathed.
His photos of the sculptor cutting down an mpingo tree and sculpting a piece of root wood, and his image of a group of sculptors at work beneath an enormous mango tree, are remarkable.
It is feared that the continued uncontrolled exploitation of the mpingo tree will cause it to become commercially extinct within a few decades.