(EDITOR’S NOTE: This remarkable feature was written by Alexander Trowbridge and published by the BBC on August 19, 2021.)
FOR TWO winter days in The Bahamas each year, the main street of the country’s capital is transformed into a river of sound and colour. Drums, horns and cow bells permeate the Caribbean air as thousands in elaborately decorated costumes dance down the pavement.
In The Bahamas, an archipelago with a population just less than 400,000, these parades, the culture that surrounds them and the related performances that take place throughout the year are known by one word: Junkanoo. For historian Arlene Nash Ferguson, it’s been a lifelong passion.
She was just four when she asked her family if she could dance in the parades, inspired by her uncle, Ivern Bosfield, who helped convince the government to bring back the festival after it was banned in the 1940s following a riot.
“It was not something that ‘good’ people did in those days,” she said. “It had a social stigma attached to it and especially when it came to women. But my family thought it was cute that I was taking after him. And they allowed me to do it, and the rest as they say is history.”
She converted her childhood home in downtown Nassau into the Educulture Junkanoo Museum that teaches visitors about the festival and its roots. Walking through the museum is to follow the history of Junkanoo, particularly the evolution of its costumes.
“In the old days, the costumes were made from indigenous materials. Sponge, leaves, feathers, palm branches. Whatever we could find,” she said. “Eventually paper came to be the main medium of costuming, which for me is very significant because Africans were not permitted to learn to read and write.”
The history of Junkanoo is deeply intertwined with the country’s history of slavery. Though the origins of its name are disputed, the celebration days of Boxing Day and New Year’s Day correspond with the only days that slaves were given a break from their forced labour.
According to Ferguson, what they did with those days was an act of resistance. See complete BBC story at https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210818-the-bahamas-queen-of-junkanoo
(EDITOR’S NOTE: I simply had to share this wonderful feature with readers of BAHAMAS CHRONICLE, not only because it is an excellent article on one of The Bahamas’ major traditional cultural expressions, but Arlene Nash Ferguson is my “Little Sister,” whom I have known from she was a “tiny tot.” Her brother Garth H.O. Nash has been one of my best friends from my early teenage hears, and I spent a lot of time on West Street Hill – where her childhood home, which is now the Educulture Junkanoo Museum is located — at the home of our mutual boyhood friend, the late Charles “Chuck” Virgill, where meetings of our young men’s club THE FRATERNITY were held on Sunday afternoons.)
