The work of the sculptor Mayele was greeted with admiration in 1939 by the Amis de l’Art Indigène. But despite his evident craftmanship, viewed through a contemporary lens, Mayele’s compositions seem surprisingly similar to what we now call tourist art. The skill with which he constructs ‘tradition’, and the compositions with different moving figures with rather Western proportions, were, in the eyes of the AAI, the artist’s own choice. But his style, and in particular the ‘refined physique’ of his sculpture, responded perfectly to the preferences of his white patrons — even though they themselves claimed that they protected Mayele ‘from every influence that went against the natural development of his art’.