Organizers
Nicholas “Rocky” Ferguson
Nicholas “Rocky” Ferguson hails from the “forgotten” parish of St. Thomas. He is a medical doctor, kumina practitioner, resident advisor at the University of the West Indies, and a trained teacher of mathematics at the high school level. He holds degrees in mathematics (with a minor in economics), as well as bachelor’s degrees in medicine, Surgery, and Basic Medical Sciences and a Postgraduate diploma in Education. His mother’s mantra, “anything worth doing is worth doing well,” has been the cornerstone of his approach to life and this has fueled his journey through successes and challenges. “Rocky” formed the St. Thomas Kumina Collective in 2018 to headline the first iteration of Tambufest, an annual kumina festival in Jamaica that he co-organizes with Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn and Deborah Thomas.
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.
Deborah A. Thomas
Deborah A. Thomas is an interdisciplinary scholar, filmmaker, and producer. She is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology and the Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of prize-winning books, including Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation (2019), Exceptional Violence (2011), and Modern Blackness (2004), and she co-edited the volumes Sovereignty Unhinged (2023), Citizenship on the Edge (2022), Changing Continuities and the Scholar-Activist Anthropology of Constance R. Sutton (2022), and Globalization and Race (2006). Thomas co-directed and co-produced the documentary films Bad Friday (2011) and Four Days in May (2017) and she co-curated a multi-media installation titled Bearing Witness: Four Days in West Kingston, which was on view at the Penn Museum from November 2017 to October 2020. She is the recipient of several awards including a Guggenheim fellowship, and she is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Prior to Thomas’s life as an academic, she was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women.
Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn
Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn is a percussionist who has performed and recorded with a variety of well-known reggae artistes and dance companies, and who has also composed percussive scores for dance and film. He was the composer, co-director and co-producer for the films Bad Friday and Four Days in May, and the co-curator of a multi-media installation titled Bearing Witness: Four Days in West Kingston, which was on view at the Penn Museum from November 2017 to October 2020. Wedderburn was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, and as a youth, he performed with many cultural luminaries across the island, including Neville Black, Kapo, Olive Lewin and the Jamaican Folk Singers, Imogene “Queenie” Kennedy, Ivy Baxter, Lavinia Williams and the Jolly Boys Mento Band. At 16, Wedderburn began attending the Jamaica School of Music and he joined the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica. He also founded the group Dominion Percussion, which played Afro-Jamaican drumming traditions and won several gold medals from the National Festival Commission. Performing with reggae artiste Burning Spear led Wedderburn to New York City, where he founded Ancient Vibrations, a percussion group that presents traditional Afro-Jamaican rhythms and chants, the roots of reggae music. Between 1990-1995, Wedderburn toured extensively with Urban Bush Women, performing and creating percussive scores for both repertoire and evening-length pieces. He has played with The Lion King on Broadway since it began development in 1997.
The St. Thomas Kumina Collective
The St. Thomas Kumina Collective is a living, breathing testament to the resilience and vibrancy of Jamaican culture, particularly the rich, spiritual music of kumina, in which every drumbeat carries history, and every chant is a bridge to the ancestors. Kumina emerged in the parish of St. Thomas, Jamaica when indentured laborers were brought from the Kongo region of Central Africa after the abolition of slavery in 1838. For practitioners, kumina is born in you; it is an inheritance, and it defines a lineage. 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. The St. Thomas Kumina Collective represents a dynamic subset of the various kumina practitioners who span the parish, bringing together the heart and soul of St. Thomas’s musical heritage.
