OUR STORY
What is Tambufest…
Tambufest is a kumina festival Junior "Gabu" Wedderburn and Deborah A. Thomas have co-organized with Nicholas "Rocky" Allen and the St. Thomas Kumina Collective since 2018 in Jamaica and beyond. Our intention with Tambufest is to create the conditions for dignity, healing, and collectivity. It is a festival that is part community fun day, part discussion, and part performed ritual practice designed to bring people together in community to reflect on issues that affect their lives. In past years, we’ve facilitated moderated discussions about political violence, about prostate cancer and healing, about the various forms of land dispossession that are afoot across Jamaica, and about the issues facing Rastafari and small growers of ganja seeking to penetrate the medicinal market. Our intention with these discussions – or “reasonings,” as they are called in the Jamaican context – is to chart new futures, explicitly and unconsciously, through the portal of kumina and the relations it brings into being.
It is important to note that Tambufest is a space of performed ritual practice, which is to say that in showcasing kumina, among other Afro-Jamaican ritual traditions, we are not seeking to produce a mass myal event. Instead, we are curious whether it is possible to cooperatively activate the conditions for the relational space of myal, and if in that space, we can glean insights into how we learn to surrender to each other, and to a different way of reckoning collective belonging and accountability. There is also an aspect of Tambufest that might be understood as the protection of a heritage perceived to be endangered. Not as many practitioners know the “bongo language” as they previously did, and there are songs that have fallen out of ceremonial rotation while others that, as one elder put it, “are not appropriate to this culture,” have been brought in. The eldest women who were keepers of the tradition have passed on, and practitioners worry about kumina becoming “watered down” without the strong leadership of elders.
The Origins of Tambufest…
The idea for Tambufest emerged when Junior and Deborah were looking for ways to generate grassroots discussions about political and drug-related violence in Jamaica. We, alongside Deanne Bell, now an associate professor of Critical Psychology and Decolonial Studies at Nottingham Trent University, had been working on a project with residents of West Kingston after the “Tivoli Incursion” in 2010, when Jamaican security forces, supported by the United States, entered the Tivoli Gardens community in search of Christopher “Dudus” Coke, who had been ordered for extradition to the U.S. to stand trial for gun- and drug-running charges. The search for Coke resulted in the deaths of at least 74 civilians. During our work with them, we sought to provide a platform for them to memorialize loved ones they had lost, and to narrate what had happened during the four days the security forces occupied their neighborhood.
While we were doing interviews and beginning to amass archival footage regarding the long histories of political violence in Jamaica, Junior suggested we hold a drum circle to commemorate the anniversary of the incursion at the downtown arts space, Roktowa. We provided refreshments as kumina and nyabinghi drummers played, and attendees danced the circle. The following year, we organized a similar event at Liberty Hall, a downtown cultural center that was formerly the site of Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which members of the Hannah Town Cultural Group (who had worked with us on the Tivoli project) attended. Similarly, when our exhibit, “Bearing Witness: Four Days in West Kingston,” opened at the Penn Museum in November 2017, we brought kumina drummers, revival singers, and nyabinghi drummers to bless the space, and once we finished our film, Four Days in May: Kingston 2010, we held community-based screenings in Kingston, St. Thomas, and Portland, as well as at the University of the West Indies-Mona Campus, following them with moderated discussions and opening and closing them with drumming.
Because these discussions generated collective reasoning about the effect of Jamaica’s history on the present, and raised questions about the future, we became interested in the extent to which this kind of format – an artistic engagement followed by kumina drumming – could generate greater dialogue and collaborative solutions to the ongoing problem of political and drug-related violence in Jamaica. Rocky suggested that we convene people from a range of kumina groups to form a kind of collective that could play at our screenings, in order to release potentially difficult discussions by coming together in music, dance, and song. Junior saw this as an extension of the work he had been doing most of his adult life to preserve and reinvigorate the traditional musical practices associated with Afro-Jamaican rituals. As a result, we felt that building a festival that centered a “reasoning” process, and that featured kumina and other related practices, could serve to create dialogical spaces in Jamaica and beyond, within which communities might discuss the forms of renewal and respect they would like to see moving forward. Thus began Tambufest in 2018.
Our Intentions…
The intentions behind Tambufest, as with other community-based spaces of care, creativity, and spirituality, are to promote reflection and joy, to think from circularity rather than linearity, to create channels for accountability to each other, and to transparently engage with our histories and our future, at one and the same time. Throughout the long night of the festival, dancers surrender to the drums, drummers surrender to the ancestors, some audience members surrender to sleep, and others join the circle of dance, moving collectively in and toward a relational, iterative practice of being and belonging. By bringing together representatives of different kumina groups, the St. Thomas Kumina Collective attempts to refuse divisions among practitioners that had been unwittingly (though perhaps inevitably) introduced by nationalist institutions like the JCDC through the competitive logics of the Festival program. And by tapping into transnational networks of practitioners and promotors, Tambufest constitutes one iteration of a broader multi-scalar complex of traditional and popular cultural production through which we try to engage the violences of modern political formations in order to imagine alternative futures. Our aim, in brief, is to tap into that space of memory, that inheritance, that knows that the body – individually and collectively – is unbounded.
