The Montserrat Jumbie Dance: Reclaiming a lost heritage

Blog series Americas and Oceania

Author Yvonne Weekes PhD OE is a retired lecturer at the University of the West Indies, a writer, arts educator and scholar. She is a 2025 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow at the British Library.

Why is it easy for us to accept the witchcraft in the Harry Potter films? Why is it acceptable for me as a child to read The Lion, the With and the Wardrobe while the Jumbie Dance is considered 'simple, foolish and terrible'?

My research at the British Library has been motivated out of my concern for the erasure of the traditional African spiritual practice the Jumbie Dance on the island of Montserrat, an island devastated by the ongoing volcanic eruption of 1995. Since then, archival memories have been disrupted and the traditions of drummers, drum makers and dancers are now extinct.

Mitchell (2006) posits that the jumbie dance represented a freedom of expression which manifested itself in a spiritual practice connecting the need for freedom from domination by the slave master as well as an African manifestation of self-identity. A 1736 law 'struck at the cultural arts of music and dance' banning the use of the drum an essential feature of the Jumbie Dance in 'the interest of plantation security' (p. 214).

Practiced in secret, the Jumbie Dance was considered to be the 'purest manifestations of folk religion in Montserrat' (p.214). Dottin, a Roman Catholic priest working in Montserrat in the 70s and 80s provides an ethnographic account of the Jumbie Dance as spirit possession and trance performance. He makes reference also to the jumbie table (Weekes/Blue Soap 2011) a ritual in which food is laid out for the ancestors. He describes that quadrille type movement and the act of 'turning' as not just a choreographic principle but the moment by which the jumbie would enter a dancer who would 'turn', that is become possessed by a jumbie.

A dancer would become possessed or go into a trance and then speak some significant revelation to the community – an evil would be revealed, a right would be wronged or perhaps someone would be healed. Both figures above come from Dottins’ work. The figure to the right shows the dancers with musicians in the background.

There were basically four instruments a small drum, used to entice the spirit/s; the African babala drum, the triangle and concertina. Although an interview with a relative also identified the mouth organ and scraper. The woo woo – a flat goat skinned rim – had more to do with the drummers’ technique of using his fingers on the drum to create a non-musical haunting sound 'woo woo'.

There was a blending of religious belief and practices with, for example, Roman Catholicism. Dobbin’s researched showed the way in which 'altar candles, rosaries and saints medals' were utilised and in fact Mitchell describes the musicians 'as obeah men'.

The term 'obeah' was not defined by the law makers yet it still exists on the statute books of Montserrat – Revised Laws of Montserrat 1962. It was quite normal for these musicians and dancers to be both Christian and 'obeah men', seen as evil and in direct 'conflict with that Christian and colonial cosmic frame of reference' (Skinner, 2005).

In my view, this further contributed to the demise of the Jumbie Dance. Montserratian police and court records show jumbie dances and obeah to be punished by raids, floggings, imprisonment, fine, and even an arrest as late as 1961.

According to the late historian Howard Fergus, the Montserrat Jumbie Dance was mostly practiced mostly by the black lower class and was considered depraved and primitive. There is no doubt that the attitudes of middle-class blacks, their denial of an African past, a self-imposed inferiority and self-hatred led to the demise of the Jumbie Dance. It is not surprising given the atrocities of slavery in Montserrat that the enslaved turned to religion in order to bear their adversity and Dobbin saw this as an act of political defiance.

The last 'known' Jumbie Dance was held in 1991 at the Sturge Park (once home to the local Carnival activities) and was organised specifically to appease the ancestral spirts after a series of disastrous losing streak of Montserrat sports teams.

My own recollection of this event is that Christians were deeply offended by this 'hex'. Sadly, the Jumbie Dance has disappeared and most of us, including myself, have never seen one. Mitchell argues that Judeo-Western Christianity is one of the causes of the extinction of the Jumbie Dance (p.215).

I am excited that this Eccles fellowship has given me the opportunity to create a series of poems and essays which can be utilised by Montserrat’s cultural/artistic community. I believe that although the Jumbie Dance is no longer practiced, the work resulting from this fellowship will have a permanent place in the personal narratives and collective memory of the island. I end this blog with one of the shorter poems which reflect my initial rationale for conducting this research.

Erased

I can only speak of what I know: that lovers

will turn over in their beds and see a pink morning;

that the earth will turn despite our dead; that the old

sea churns over our history yet reveal no bones;

that any morning a woman with or without

teeth will turn cornmeal into art; the jumbies

may never reveal themselves. It is also possible

that no one will turn again in a jumbie dance.

But what frightens me, is the possibility of a world

turning with my people erased.

References

• Akenson Donald Harman. (1997). If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630 – 1730. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
• Barnes, Vernice C. (2023). Montserrat Masquerade and Jumbie Dance.
• Dottin, Jay, D. (1986). A Study of Trance Ritual in the West Indies. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
• Fergus, Howard. (2004). Montserrat: A History of Caribbean Colony (second edition). London: MacMillan Caribbean.
• Handler, Jerome S. and Kenneth M. Bilby. (2012). Enacting Power: the criminalization of obeah in the anglophone Caribbean, 1760 – 2011. University Press of the West Indies.
• Mitchell, Mozella, (2007). G. Crucial Issues in Caribbean Religions. The University of Virginia.
• Skinner, Jonathan (2005) Interning the Serpent: Witchcraft, Religion and the Law on Montserrat in the 20th Century. In History and Anthropology. University of Surrey.
• Weekes, Yvonne. “Blue Soap” in Emancipation Moments edited by Rawle Gibbons.