Jonkonnu is an African diaspora holiday tradition whose roots can be traced back to Jamaica, other Caribbean countries and to the slave ships from West Africa. Enslaved people gathered to drum, dance, and parade during Jonkonnu often celebrated around Christmas or Near New Years Day.
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Image description: Top left illustration: “Band of the Jaw-Bone John-Canoe” In Jamaica by Isaac Mendes Belisario
Top right illustration: Engraving of John Kuners from Ladies Home Journal, December 1891.
Bottom illustration: 1857 illustration from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper depicts a Christmas celebration among enslaved African Americans on Somerset plantation in North Carolina.- Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper- 26 December 1857, page 64 - Source: Library of Congress
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Historical records mention celebrations of Jonkonnu taking place near Edenton, N.C. at Somerset plantation in Creswell, North Carolina as early as 1824, and at Stagville plantation in Durham in 1848. So far, except for a single 19th-century historical reference to a Jonkonnu celebration in Suffolk, VA, historians have been unable to uncover any evidence that it was ever part of the culture in North America outside of North Carolina.

Enslaved people and their descendants actively celebrated Jonkonnu through the 1800s. However, by the early 1900s, the tradition faded as Jim Crow laws took hold.

During the festivities both free and enslaved Black people would wear costumes, sing songs, and dance. They would go door-to-door, often with a tin cup to collect coins and small gifts from white American landowners. Today, museums and historic sites across NC have recreated the tradition to educate visitors about African American holiday traditions.

In a Jan. 1848 letter from Anne Ruffin Cameron, Stagville, to Paul C. Cameron, New Orleans found in the Cameron Family Papers - Enslavement Records collection, it is documented where she wrote about a Jonkonnu at Stagville plantation that December during the Christmas celebrations.

More detailed descriptions survive from coastal North Carolina sites, as the one Harriet Jacobs details in her autobiography, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." Written by Herself: Harriet A. (Ann) Jacobs, 1813-1897- ed. by Lydia Maria Francis Child, 1802-1880. Which is considered a rare first-hand account from an enslaved person's perspective in the United States. She described it as a central and highly anticipated Christmas celebration for enslaved people.

“Every child rises early on Christmas morning to see the Johnkannaus. Without them, Christmas would be shorn of its greatest attraction,” Jacobs wrote.

She continued; "For a month previous they are composing songs, which are sung on this occasion. These companies, of a hundred each, turn out early in the morning, and are allowed to go round till twelve o’clock, begging for contributions. Not a door is left unvisited where there is the least chance of obtaining a penny or a glass of rum. They do not drink while they are out, but carry the rum home in jugs, to have a carousal.”

The participants consisted of "companies of slaves from the plantations" and they were often "athletic men, in calico wrappers". They wore a net thrown over them, covered in "bright-colored stripes". Their heads were decorated with horns, and cows' tails were fastened to their backs. The revelers prepared for a month in advance by composing songs and their music was made using a "gumbo box" (a sheepskin-covered box or drum), triangles, and jawbones, to which dancers kept time. The groups were allowed to go around until noon on Christmas morning, visiting every door to beg for contributions, such as money or rum. They carried the rum home in jugs for a later carousal. It was a moment of freedom for the enslaved people, the festival was a moment of temporary power and a subversion of the social order. It was an event that allowed them liberties and a release of what white slavers called, a "rebellious spirit" not permitted at other times of the year.

What many say began as a tradition among the enslaved in 17th century colonial Jamaica, Jonkonnu is a festival of music, masquerade and parade, that centered on the power and influence of ritual and healing. It's a "brand of revelry that started on the plantations that, predate emancipation and independence and, by extension, carnival in the Western Hemisphere."

Jonkonnu (in its various spellings) could refer to a chief in Guinea where the practice is believed to have originated, or from the French word inconnu', meaning unknown. It is most likely taken from the Ewe language, according to Professor Frederic Cassidy, where "jonkunnu" means witch doctor/shaman/spiritual healer. It evolved into a blend of African customs intermingling with Caribbean rituals and African American traditions once the festival arrived on the soil of southern plantations.

During their three-day Christmas respite, many enslaved people in South Carolina engaged in festivities that included music, dancing, communal meals, and the receipt of gifts.
The details of such events varied widely, of course, from plantation to plantation in the country and from house to house in urban centers. This merriment coincided with religious celebrations of the anniversary of the birth of Jesus, but their mirth did not necessarily flow from spiritual fervor. Before and after the widespread Christianization of African captives in the American South, their Christmas festivities celebrated survival and fellowship in the face of great adversity.

Not everyone viewed such festivities in a positive light, however. Some reports dating from the eighteenth century describe holiday celebrations among the enslaved population as riotous disruptions. Presbyterian minister Alexander Hewatt, for example, worked in Charleston during the 1760s and 1770s and published a robust history of South Carolina after his return to Britain. “Sundays and holidays are indeed allowed [to] the negroes in Carolina, the former cannot consistent with the laws be denied them; the latter, as they are commonly spent[,] are nuisances to the province. Holidays there are days of idleness, riot, wantonness and excess; in which the slaves assemble together in alarming crowds, for the purposes of dancing, feasting and merriment.”[2]

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Article
Jonkonnu: The holiday when Black revelers could mock their enslavers
By Gillian Brockell / WaPo - December 26, 2021

Edward Warren was a young doctor in the early 1850s when he first witnessed it. Later in life, he described what he saw at Christmastime among the enslaved population at Somerset Place, one of the largest plantations in North Carolina.

On Christmas Day, he wrote, one of the enslaved men dressed up in a costume made of rags, cowbells, “two great oxhorns” affixed to his head and a mask of raccoon skin over his face. Another wore his Sunday best. Others beat drums and played banjos while the two men “entered upon a dance of the most extraordinary character.”

“I was convinced from the first that it was of foreign origin,” he wrote, “based on some festive ceremony which the negroes had inherited from their African ancestors.”

Not exactly. Though Jonkonnu, pronounced “John Canoe,” was a folk custom practiced by enslaved Africans and their descendants, it is likely to have originated in Jamaica in the late 1600s, according to historian Robert E. May, author of “Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory.” From there, it spread to much of the Caribbean and “really came into its own” in coastal North Carolina in the decades before the Civil War, May told The Washington Post.

“It was a male parade — females sometimes came along but they were never the paraders — and the parades occurred on plantations [and] in towns and cities,” either on Christmas or the day after, May said. He added, “They tended to go from place to place, picking up a bigger crowd as they marched.”

That included going to the homes of their White enslavers, White clergy and other townspeople, where they would “raise a ruckus” until they were given money or gifts to leave. (Close observers of Christmas history may recognize similarities to English peasants’ wassailing and mummer’s nights.)

The revelers played instruments — drums, violins, banjos, tambourines and the like — and dressed in costumes that White observers sometimes described as “grotesque.” Intimidation and mocking of White people was one element of the parade, May said. One of the costumed revelers would carry a whip and threaten children with it; another would dress in a suit and tri-cornered or top hat and act out unflattering depictions of their enslavers.

“What they’re doing is they’re forcing Whites for a short while to immerse themselves in Black culture,” May said. “There was something very satisfying about that.”

If someone didn’t give the requisite coins or gifts, the revelers sang a song whose words amounted to, “Oh this poor guy, he’s so broke he can’t even afford to give us spare change,” May said.

Of course, most of what we know of Jonkonnu — also called Junkanoo, John Kooner and John Kunering — comes from descriptions written by White observers, so their biases must be taken into account. Some noted the “gaiety” and “merriment” of the enslaved.

Harriet Jacobs, who was enslaved in Edenton, N.C., gave a rare account of Jonkonnu from a Black perspective. In her 1861 memoir, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” she wrote, “Every child rises early on Christmas morning to see the Johnkannaus. Without them, Christmas would be shorn of its greatest attraction.”

She described the revelers’ costumes and instruments, then continued: “For a month previous they are composing songs, which are sung on this occasion. These companies, of a hundred each, turn out early in the morning, and are allowed to go round till twelve o’clock, begging for contributions. Not a door is left unvisited where there is the least chance of obtaining a penny or a glass of rum. They do not drink while they are out, but carry the rum home in jugs, to have a carousal.”

Jacobs also described the heart-wrenching occasions when she watched from a distance as her children enjoyed the parade. Jacobs hid in an attic for seven years to escape the sexual harassment of her enslaver; that meant hiding from her own children, too, to avoid detection. On Christmas, she could catch a glimpse of them enjoying the festivities from holes she had made in her “prison,” as she called the attic. (The family was eventually reunited in New York after she escaped slavery.)

So why would enslavers, who held their captives in literal and figurative chains, who controlled all the weapons, the military and law enforcement, allow a day of revelry, mocking and intimidation?

It wasn’t a spirit of charity, May said. As with wassailing in England, enslavers may have seen it as a “pressure relief valve.”

“The idea is that you have to give people who all year long are humiliated, whipped, bossed around, told what to do, family-separated, sexually exploited — you have to give them some way to vent their frustrations,” he said. “Some way that’s basically harmless, but you need to let them vent.”

Even if White enslavers went along with it, May stressed that Jonkonnu originated in the Black community.

In other areas of the antebellum South where Jonkonnu didn’t exist, enslaved people were still generally given off a few days between Christmas and the new year. They could use this time to rest or visit family; some found it was the best time of year to attempt an escape. For many, this was the only time of year they could feast or just plain party.

Famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who had been enslaved in Maryland before escaping at age 20, wrote with disgust about Christmas on plantations, describing how enslavers encouraged drunkenness, even taking bets on who among the enslaved would get the drunkest. This practice, he wrote, “appears to have no other object than to disgust the slaves with their temporary freedom, and to make them as glad to return to their work, as they were to leave it.”

Douglass agreed with the “pressure release valve” theory, writing, “Were the slaveholders to abandon this practice, I have not the slightest doubt it would lead to an immediate insurrection among the slaves. These holidays serve as conductors, or safety-valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity.”

By the time the Civil War began, Jonkonnu was already falling out of favor in the Black community, May said. Post-emancipation, Black leaders encouraged African Americans to become “upstanding citizens” who “deserved the vote,” believing that would convince White Americans to let go of their racism. Jonkonnu, with its costumes, wild dancing and panhandling, didn’t fit into that rubric. The last known Jonkonnu celebration in the United States was in Wilmington, N.C., in the late 1880s.

But in the Caribbean, where many of the islands had, and have, Black majorities, it has continued and evolved. In the Bahamas, Junkanoo is a Dec. 26 festival during which teams, now including women, compete for the best costume, dancing and music. Gone are the rags, whips and horns; in their place are elaborate headdresses and colorful tunics decorated with feathers, sequins and glitter.

It’s a “joyous Bahamian celebration,” according to Arlene Nash Ferguson of Nassau’s Junkanoo Museum.
-End of article-
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Sources:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/12/26/jonkonnu-christmas-enslaved/

https://fromthepage.com/unclibraries/cameron-family-papers-records-of-enslavement/work-00133-1024-0016-19

https://www.irememberourhistory.org/white-chattel-slavery/harriet-a.-(ann)-jacobs---the-slaves'-new-year's-day.

https://bahamianology.com/a-problem-with-history-what-are-we-really-celebrating-at-john-canoe/

https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/ghost-christmas-past-joy-and-fear-during-era-slavery