Alberto Chissano was born on 25 January 1935, in Chicavane-Manjacaze, Gaza province, in southern Mozambique, and ended his life on 19 February 1994, in Matola, Mozambique. One month before his death, the Alberto Chissano Gallery Museum was inaugurated on Torre do Vale Street, located in the Sial neighbourhood - municipality of Matola, outskirts of Maputo - near the house where he lived. The museum houses a large collection of sculptures by Chissano, as well as paintings by artists from Mozambique and other nationalities. He lost his father at the time of his birth, but he had predicted that Alberto would be "the smartest one". Later, the sculptor would realise that this wisdom was in his "hands". He worked as a cattle herder during part of his childhood, and it is believed that his grandmother introduced him to the arts of witchcraft. Later, in Maputo, he worked as an apprentice tailor, cook, worked in mines in South Africa, and was a soldier upon his return to Mozambique. At a certain point in his wandering life, he received an invitation from Júlio Navarro to join the Lourenço Marques Art Centre as a janitor. As he recounted, at the Art Centre he saw the paintings by José Júlio and Malangatana and was amazed. The artists challenged him to create, and Malangatana was instrumental in giving him the impetus to start as a sculptor. In the meantime, he worked at the Directorate for Lighthouses as a painter's assistant, as well as at the Álvaro de Castro Museum, where he served as a taxidermist's assistant. He preferred working with wood because he felt a calling to do so: in addition to one of his grandfathers working with wood, he considered this raw material to be specifically associated with African identity.

Alberto Chissano, the sculptor who claimed he didn't work for himself but for the people and disliked lying, acknowledged that he always carried a certain sadness, a melancholy, throughout his life. Throughout his artistic career, which began when he was already close to the age of 30, he was concerned with the understanding of art by the People, rooted in feelings, and rejected it as a business. Alberto Chissano often pointed the necks of his sculptures upwards because, as he said so delicately and sensitively, it would be necessary to "look up there".