ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates graphically how today Kumina exists as a subversive testimony to the yearnings of African-Jamaicans for Africa and their willingness to remember their Kongo homeland, illuminate the wisdom of their African ancestors. It describes the African-Jamaican struggle to define itself as a movement for self-determination in a community that thrives notwithstanding the legacy of slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism. Africans who were brought to Jamaica from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries consistently demonstrated their deep attachment to African religiosity and culture to which European authorities responded with three basic strategies: trivialization, censorship, and secularization. Kumina is often described as an insular ancestral cult that places little if any significance upon analyzing and responding to social oppression. The Kumina tradition persists today in spite of its marginalized and illegitimate status in Jamaican society. It remains an unfinished document about African people's struggle to surmount the horrors of slavery and its aftermath in Jamaica.
