13 March 2025
The program will soon follow.
Public Event | 13 March, 2025 | 17.45 - 21.00 | Lichthal, Wereldmuseum Amsterdam
Talk + Tambu, A Kumina Reasoning features a discussion and a kumina performance. Deborah Thomas, Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn, and Nicholas “Rocky” Ferguson will discuss “Tambufest,” a kumina festival they have co-organized for the past six years – to reflect on the ways community-based spaces of care, creativity, and spirituality can open portals to thinking beyond linearity, creating channels for accountability, and investigating contemporary mobilizations of personhood and political life on post-but-still-colonial terrain. The discussion poses several questions: What can bodies tell us about ontologies that cannot be recuperated or resolved into Western ways of knowing? How might an attunement to bodily inheritances provide inroads into genealogies of sovereignty alternative to those that are tethered to the foundational frames of property, accumulation, and dispossession? The discussion will be followed by a presentation of the St. Thomas Kumina Collective in which audience members will be invited to participate in a reasoning and performance in which music and dance are central to a community-building and healing process.
About the participants
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.
This collective counts on the participation of the following members: Kerriean Taniecia Stewart-Morgan, Dwayne Granville Barrant, Cornel Glenel Constable, Jenese Dion Lewis, Latoya Anice Briscoe, Avalyn Sophia Cornwal, Bradley Raphael Thomas and Nicholas Zephiniah 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.
Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, and the Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. Her recent book, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair, was awarded the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award from the Caribbean Studies Association in 2021, and the Senior Book Prize from the American Ethnological Society in 2020. She is also the author Exceptional Violence and Modern Blackness, and the co-editor of the volumes Sovereignty Unhinged, Citizenship on the Edge, Changing Continuities and the Scholar-Activist Anthropology of Constance R. Sutton, and Globalization and Race. Thomas co-directed the documentary films Bad Friday and Four Days in May, and she is the co-curator of a multi-media installation titled Bearing Witness: Four Days in West Kingston. 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 her life in the academy, she was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women.
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.
