Bahamian culture: Junkanoo, dialect, churches and conch

Where Junkanoo came from is disputed

Junkanoo is the parade Bahamians call their national festival, and nobody agrees on where it began. The Bahamas government's own page on the festival says its true origin is unknown, traces its roots to West Africa, and dates it in the islands to around the 17th century. The Wikipedia article on the festival says the evidence points to Jamaica, from where it spread through the Caribbean by the 18th century, and records that in the Bahamas it is said to date back to the 1700s. A historian writing for TIME, Sasha Wells of Florida International University, gives the earliest recorded Bahamian celebrations as the 1820s.

The name is disputed too. The government page repeats the most popular legend, of John Canoe, an African chief who demanded the right to celebrate with his people after being enslaved in the West Indies. Other accounts derive the word from the French gens inconnus, unknown people, for the masked revellers, or from John Canoe as the name of an Ahanta chief and Akan warrior who ruled Axim, in present-day Ghana, before 1720. Scholars have argued for an Akan source for the masking itself, and others for Igbo or Yoruba ones.

What the accounts share is the setting. Enslavers gave enslaved people a holiday at Christmas, and the parade grew out of what they did with it: masks and drumming, which TIME's account reads as celebration and quiet protest at once. After emancipation in 1834 the colonial government kept permitting it, and Africans freed from slave ships and landed in the islands brought their own traditions into it. In 1849 Afro-Bahamians were reported stilt-walking under the name John Canoe.

How Junkanoo was banned and brought back

The parade has always been about who could occupy Bay Street, the commercial heart of Nassau. In 1913 a newspaper complained of masqueraders moving along the street at New Year with energy better spent at work, and rushing into town at night broke the colony's racial segregation of public space. In 1938 the parade was moved from Christmas morning to Boxing Day after churches objected to it coinciding with Christmas Day, and in 1939 the Nassau Guardian called the revellers truculent.

After the Burma Road riot of June 1942, when Black labourers building two military airfields rioted over being paid half what American workers earned, the government banned all street parading, Junkanoo included, from 1942 to 1947. People rushed anyway: the Nassau Guardian reported a hundred or more parading in 1942.

What brought it back was tourism. At the insistence of tourism promoters Junkanoo returned to Bay Street in 1948, regulated by a new Citizens Masquerade Committee. The festival that had been policed as a threat became something the colony showed its visitors.

What a Junkanoo group does all year

The parades run through the early hours of Boxing Day and New Year's Day, from 1 a.m. to 9 a.m. by the government's timetable, on Bay Street and in some Family Island settlements. Junkanoo also appears on Independence Day, 10 July, and on Emancipation Day. A Junior Junkanoo parade is held in New Providence in December.

The costumes changed with the materials to hand. The government page describes early costumes of cloth and fringed paper, sea sponges when sponging was big business in the late 1920s, then fringes of newspaper and finally crepe paper. Today costumes are built on cardboard frames with wire and papier mâché and covered in hundreds of layers of fringed crepe paper. The music is goatskin drums and cowbells, whistles and brass. Home-made instruments of conch shell and poinciana pods have given way to manufactured ones.

The large groups, the Valley Boys, the Saxons, Roots and One Family among them, have 500 to 1,000 members each and work from about June or July on themes, costumes, music and choreography they keep secret until the rush. Each is judged in three categories, its musicians, its dancers and its costumes, and compete for cash and the title of best group under the rules of the National Junkanoo Association; smaller scrap groups compete alongside. Winning costumes go on show at a Junkanoo museum in Nassau. The themes, as the government page describes them, range from lessons in the islands' history to satire, and anyone who keeps the association's rules may join a group, visitors included. The parade reached cinema audiences early: the James Bond film Thunderball showed it, and described it wrongly as a local festival of the Mardi Gras type.

The two sources disagree on when women joined. TIME records Maureen Duvalier as the first female Junkanoo dancer in the 1950s, leading the first group to rush in uniform costumes; the government page says women did not take part until the 1960s.

How Bahamians speak between English and creole

English is the official language. What most people speak day to day is what Bahamians call dialect, and whether it is English or a separate creole has been argued only since the early 1980s. A dissertation of 1978 first suggested that Afro-Bahamian speech might be a creole lying between Black American English and creoles such as Gullah and Jamaican. Linguists now describe a continuum from standard English at one end to an English-based creole at the other, with the basilectal, creole end more common on islands settled early or with large Black populations and the standard end more common in Nassau.

The link to Gullah, spoken on the coast of South Carolina, is close, because many Bahamians descend from people enslaved in that region and brought to the islands by Loyalists after the American Revolution. Some evidence suggests that the Loyalist arrival increased creolisation. The writer and actor Laurente Gibbs coined the name Bahamianese in a poem and has promoted it since.

Features of the speech are specific. Speakers in Abaco and north Eleuthera often drop or add the sound h, so that harm and arm sound alike; many merge v and w; the vowels of fair and fear merge, as do those of pin and pen; and the second person plural can be yinna, y'all or all a ya. African words survive in everyday use, among them bey, a form of address to a boy or young person. Who settled where still shows. Bahamians of English descent, whose ancestors came with the Puritans from 1648 and the Loyalists from 1783, are sometimes called Conchy Joes, and the Wikipedia country article records that half of Abaco's population was of European descent as of 1985, many of them descendants of Southern Loyalists. A small Greek Bahamian community descends from labourers who came to work in the sponge industry in the 1900s and has kept a culture of its own. The 2010 census recorded 90.6% of residents as Black, 4.7% as White and 2.1% as mixed.

Haitian Creole, a French-based language, is spoken by Haitian immigrants and their descendants, and is known in the islands simply as Creole.

What churches mean in Bahamian life

The Bahamas is a predominantly Christian country, and Britannica describes the majority as Protestants outside the Anglican church, with smaller Roman Catholic and Anglican communities. Religious songs and spirituals are sung at wakes and other gatherings, including wake or setting-up songs with biblical themes, and the Wikipedia culture article connects the islands' religious commitment and regard for education to the Puritan founders from Bermuda.

After emancipation, the Tribune's history of the path to majority rule records, freed people built churches that doubled as schools, naming St Agnes in Grants Town, St James at Adelaide, St Mary's at Old Bight on Cat Island, Holy Trinity at Carmichael and St Stephen on Exuma. Small Jewish and Muslim communities also live in the islands, with smaller groups of other faiths.

Obeah, a folk religion of African origin, is practised by some Bahamians, mostly in the Family Islands, and is illegal. Bush medicine, the use of local plants to treat illness, has been practised since slavery and is still in use.

What the islands eat

The kitchen is built on the sea and on imports. Britannica lists grits, potatoes, bread, conch, fish, spiny lobster, chicken and imported meats as staples, and names peas and rice, potato salad, macaroni and cheese, cracked conch, conch salad, fried and steamed fish and fried chicken as national dishes. Guava duff, fruit boiled in dough and served with a butter sauce, is a popular dessert.

Conch runs through the whole culture, from the Lucayan tools and trumpets made of its shell to the conch salad of the present day. Several settlements hold festivals around the food they are known for, among them the Pineapple Fest at Gregory Town on Eleuthera and the Crab Fest on Andros, which the Bahamian embassy in Washington reported reaching its 20th edition at Fresh Creek in June 2016.

What survives of the old stories and crafts

Storytelling carried much of the traditional entertainment of the settlements before television. The trickster tales of B'Rabbit and B'Booky are African in origin, and the chickcharney is a three-toed creature with a human face. The writer Patricia Glinton-Meicholas is among those who have brought the stories back into print. Folk institutions include the asue, a collective savings association, and the friendly societies and lodges.

The music outside Junkanoo is goombay, also called rake and scrape, alongside calypso and soca, and ring dances and quadrilles are still danced. Calypso and rake-and-scrape acts such as the Baha Men found audiences in Japan and the United States, and singers such as Ronnie Butler held a following at home.

Straw work, plaiting palm fronds into hats and bags, began as a household craft in subsistence settlements, where baskets carried fruit and served as fish traps, and is now sold to visitors at the Straw Market in Nassau. On Andros the descendants of Black Seminoles who escaped from Florida in the 1820s keep a basket-making tradition of their own at Red Bays.

How the islands record their own work

Bahamian publishing begins in 1782, with a narrative by James Gambier, born on New Providence in 1756; the first known Black Bahamian author is John Boyd, whose book of poems appeared in 1834. Painters include Amos Ferguson, Brent Malone, Eddie Minnis, John Beadle and John Cox. Britannica lists the Dundas Centre for the Performing Arts, the National Art Gallery in a mansion above Nassau harbour, the Department of Archives, the Antiquities, Monuments and Museums Corporation and the Bahamas Historical Society as the institutions that keep that record.

Almost every inhabited island holds a sailing regatta or a fishing tournament each year, and the regattas, raced in old-fashioned work boats with a festival on shore, are important social events in many Family Island settlements. Cricket and football arrived with the British connection, basketball has grown, and the Bahamas Olympic Association was formed in 1952.