Kumina

What is Kumina…

Kumina emerged from the traditions of those who were brought to Jamaica from the Kongo region of Central Africa after the abolition of slavery in 1838.  Many of them had been enslaved by Spanish or Portuguese traffickers, and then recaptured by British ships patrolling the Atlantic after Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807.  Upon recapture, they would have been taken to either Sierra Leone or St. Helena (where they would have met the many Maroons who had also been settled there decades before), and then sent from there to the New World as part of the African indentured labor schemes of the post-emancipation period.

 

What these sojourners would have encountered in Jamaica has been called a “myal complex,” an African-based religious structure oriented toward healing and deliverance from the ontological degradations of slavery.  This complex generated what Sylvia Wynter would call the “indigenization” of African descendants in the so-called New World, by which she meant the processes through which Black people humanized the landscape of plantation-based slave production by peopling it with their gods and spirits .  Myal was identified (and feared) by planters as early as the 1760s as a worldview that conceptualized individuals as possessing multiple souls, and in which the dead were seen to be part of the living world. Zora Neale Hurston was one of the earliest ethnographic observers of these phenomena. In Tell My Horse, the ethnography that emerged from her field trips to Jamaica and Haiti in 1936, she wrote “there is no death. Activities are merely changed from one condition to the other.”  Here, Hurston is acknowledging that there is no fixed referent for presence, in either temporal or material terms. The present is imbued with the past and the future through the embodied presences of ancestors and generations to come. In myal, the body mediates time and lineage. Myal thus marks the non-linear and unexpected ways relation circulates and is transmitted from one to another, today, yesterday, and maybe tomorrow.

 

Scholars and artists alike have probed kumina as one of many “folk forms” in Jamaica, evidence both of civilization (or the lack thereof, depending on the interlocutor), and of continuities with Africa (in other words, a cultural inheritance beyond slavery).  Kumina, like other aspects of Jamaica’s “folk cultures,” has been mobilized by artists and other cultural workers as part of an anti-colonial turn away from Eurocentric markers of cultural competence, and by nationalist states to inculcate people into an understanding of their cultural value within the context of new political arrangements.

 

For practitioners, kumina is born in you; it is an inheritance, and it defines a lineage.  Kumina communities are often small family-based groups, sometimes called “nations” or “Bongo nations,” led by a Queen or King.  Within a kumina ceremony, the counterclockwise dancing, driven by the drums and marked by the singing, is meant to invite myal, a complex of being and knowing that heralds the return of ancestors and a surrender to spirit.  In myal, the feet become heavy, the head “grows,” consciousness wanes, the community of dancers rallies to care for the possessed individual – ushering in a state in which souls are not contained by bodies, the dead are not dead, the past is not past, the here and now is also the there and then and the possibility of something else to come.  Because myal creates the conditions for healing and well-being, individually and collectively, today and in this world, it instantiates what Sylvia Wynter has identified as “radical difference,” a difference grounded in the gods, beliefs, and modes of storytelling that accompanied Black people on slave ships, to build new worlds.  In the world of kumina, progressive developmentalist teleologies are eschewed, binaries of body and soul are destabilized, and a conception of Africanness as “exponential” – as encompassing both the particularities of ethnicity and a pan-Africanist sensibility – is advanced.

Scholarship about Kumina…

Where early American (or American-trained) observers of kumina reflected the acculturation and functionalist frameworks of many mid-20th century anthropologists, later (and local) scholars came to understand kumina as evidence of the ontological and epistemological continuity of central African notions and practices of being within Jamaica. In these texts, we are given lists of ki-Kongo words as they are used among kumina practitioners; Bakongo and Bantu cosmologies are outlined; parallels are drawn between central African prohibitions against the eating of salt and the washing of clothes in the river with those that perdure among Jamaicans; and conceptual continuities are outlined in terms of communotheism (community of deities or invisible beings), possession, ancestral veneration, and herbalism.  These interventions emerged from a more general effort during the 1960s and 1970s among West Indian scholars to reject the notion that a process of acculturation is what characterized Caribbean societies.  They argued instead that the dominant European sector, often absent, did not provide a cultural and social scaffolding to which dominated Africans had to acclimatize, but that Afro-West Indians, in maintaining, reconstructing, and transforming their own cultural practices (especially those having to do with land use and religious expression) underwent a cultural process of indigenization that rooted them in the New World, and that rejected colonial logics of personhood and production.  For these scholars, and for those who followed them, it was the African heritage embedded within the cultures that were developed during the period of slavery that should be seen as the basis for Caribbean cultural creativity, and understanding the ontologies of kumina, therefore, became part of a decolonial intellectual and political praxis. These texts coalesce around the overarching principle that the body is unbounded.  This principle is rooted within relationships between the living and the ancestors, relationships that are brought into view through drumming, dance, and myal.

 

Aside from being important to scholars, Kumina was also one of the cultural practices elaborated by artists and intellectuals in Jamaica as part of anti-colonial agitation oriented toward the development of an awareness of Afro-Jamaican cultural traditions.  In this way, though it emerged in Jamaica as an instantiation of the elaboration of life outside the plantation system, kumina became a cornerstone of a nationalist sovereignty that imagined the state as the container for liberatory aspirations. Tambufest, on the other hand, emerges from our intention to create space for world-building outside of (but in relation to) the juridical structures of modern collectivity that were founded in settler colonialism, imperialism, and slavery.

For further reading…