Moko Jumbie

The head arrives before the man does. Fifteen feet up, a peaked hat with feathers around its crown clears the second-storey balconies of Port of Spain, and the people leaning on the railings find a masked face level with their own. Below, striped stilts knock against the road, one and then the other, keeping time with a drum, a triangle and a flute. Nobody sees a foot. The skirt goes all the way to the ground.

That is the moko jumbie, and the first thing to know about him is that the men who play him say he walked. Asked where he comes from, the answer Milla Cozart Riggio recorded is that he came the whole distance from the West Coast of Africa on his own legs, over the water, keeping pace with the ships. He endured centuries of brutal handling and he is still, in his own phrase, tall tall tall.

The name is a compound, both halves of it African, and that is roughly where agreement ends. Jumbie is the settled half: a Caribbean word for a ghost or a spirit, traced to Kongo zumbi, the same root that produced English zombie, and already in West Indian print in 1764. Moko is a real fight. In Caribbean slave registers, Moko or Moco was a trader’s label for people shipped out of the Bight of Biafra, thrown loosely over Ibibio, Efik, Igbo, Ekoi and Ogoni alike; the linguist Victor Manfredi calls the term undefined, which is charitable. Garth Green and Philip Scher’s collection on the Trinidad Carnival prefers Hausa, in which moko can mean ugly. Riggio sets down what the performers themselves say, that Moko is an orisha of fate and retribution who stands astride the crossroads waiting for late travellers with poor judgement. And a whole tier of websites asserts that Moko is a Central African healer, or a god of vengeance, or a guardian deity of the Maasai, who live nowhere near either the Congo or Nigeria. That last family of claims has no scholarly root at all.

Robert Wyndham Nicholls, who has spent more time on this figure than anyone, put the two halves of the name in two different places. His 1999 study in African Arts followed the stilt masquerade back through the Virgin Islands and concluded that the mocko jumbie there has most in common with masking from the Guinea Coast, from Senegambia round to the Ivory Coast, while the word Moko points to that defunct trading designation in southeastern Nigeria. His 2012 book pressed the argument wider: the masquerade prototypes of the Eastern Caribbean were built from Upper Guinea styles fused with Western European ones, out of Britain’s West Country, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. So the figure may be carrying a Cross River name over an Upper Guinean body in a coat partly cut in Europe. Nicholls also turned up the earliest written notice of him: 1791, in St Vincent, a masked moko jumbie going through the streets with musicians behind him. Later retellings move that sighting to St Thomas. It was St Vincent.

Errol Hill described the Trinidad version at the moment it was slipping away from him. Stilts ten to fifteen feet high and gaudily striped. A long full skirt. An Eton jacket in bright satin or velvet. An admiral’s hat with long peaks front and back, feathers set around the crown. Daniel Crowley, writing the same material up in 1956, added that the hat was shaped from tosho, the dried pulp of the wild cucumber, which weighs almost nothing, holds a form and costs nothing at all. Face covered. Hands covered. The whole point was that nobody on the street knew who was up there.

His dance was a jig and he did it all day, which drew from Hill a comparison to Will Kemp, the Elizabethan clown who danced from London to Norwich. That is the right comparison for stamina if not for altitude. When mas was still played for coins, the moko jumbie held an advantage no other character could match. He could lean in at a first-floor window and take the money from a hand that never had to come downstairs.

By the middle of the twentieth century he was nearly finished. Crowley called the Trinidad moko jumbie virtually extinct in 1956. John Cowley found a newspaper report from the 1890s of stilt dancers stalking the streets to drum and fife, and after that the record thins out into private memory. Geoffrey Holder, who put moko jumbies into a Broadway musical in 1978, remembered them from boyhood as gigantic masked spectres wandering the streets once the parade had passed, and said he had been frightened and awed in the same breath.

What happened next is unusually well documented for a folk revival, because it happened recently and the people have names. In 1975, in Point Fortin, Dexter Stewart set about relearning the craft with help from John Cupid and from stilt walkers in the Virgin Islands and Barbados. In 1986 Glen de Souza, known as Dragon, opened a yard in Cocorite to give local children somewhere to go after school. He intended to teach drumming and dancing and discovered that what they wanted was stilts. One parent’s verdict on the appeal is hard to improve on: the children never want to come back to the ground. Junior Bisnath founded the Kaisokah group in San Fernando in 1995, and on 10 September 2017 assembled more than five hundred moko jumbies in Skinner Park at once. Stephanie Kanhai took the national Carnival Queen title on stilts in 2015, the first moko jumbie ever to win it. In 2016 Peter Minshall sent one across the Savannah stage costumed as a dying swan, the stilts carved into ballet shoes, and the country argued about it for weeks.

Whatever the etymology finally turns out to be, the work has not changed, and the work is about sightlines. Height is the entire gift. A figure standing three times a man’s height sees a disturbance before the street does and can be picked out from further off than a drum carries, which is why the roles reported for stilt maskers across Africa are guardian roles, held in sacred contexts and often inside societies that kept their business to themselves. In the Caribbean he blesses, he turns evil aside, and until recently he came out with one or two companions and a small band rather than in a troupe. Hill judged that the ritual weight had been lost somewhere in the crossing and that the West Indian figure was pure entertainment. The Smithsonian’s own account of Trinidad Carnival reports the opposite from inside the tradition: these are ancestral spirits who came over the water to protect the people who were taken. Both statements are in print. The performers are not confused about which of them they mean.

The limits are the limits of a body on two sticks. The legs have to be made, and Jeff Henry recorded that they were cut from a chosen wood and left to cure and dry, the cutting timed to the moon. Getting up is one skill; staying up is a second, since a moko jumbie is never quite still and is forever shifting weight from one stick to the other; coming down without disgrace is a third. Fall, and he is a man on the ground in a skirt. The tradition carries a frailty its ancestors would recognise too, which is that it dies the moment nobody teaches it. That has already nearly happened once.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Moko Jumbie?

A Moko Jumbie is a masked stilt-walking spirit figure of Trinidadian and wider Caribbean Carnival, standing ten to fifteen feet tall on painted wooden stilts. He acts as a guardian, going ahead of the revelry to bless the crowd and turn evil away from it. In the U.S. Virgin Islands the same figure is called the Mocko Jumbie.

What does the name Moko Jumbie mean?

Jumbie is a Caribbean word for a ghost or spirit, traced to Kongo zumbi and recorded in the West Indies by 1764. Moko is disputed: it was a slave-trader’s label for people shipped from the Bight of Biafra, it may be a Hausa word meaning ugly, and Trinidadian performers describe Moko as an orisha of fate and retribution. Claims that Moko was a Central African healer or a Maasai deity have no scholarly support.

Where did the Moko Jumbie come from?

Robert Wyndham Nicholls traced the stilt masquerade to West African prototypes and argued its closest matches lie on the Guinea Coast between Senegambia and the Ivory Coast, with European masking traditions folded in during the Caribbean centuries. The name itself points instead to southeastern Nigeria. The earliest written record of a moko jumbie in the Caribbean is from St Vincent in 1791.

What does a Moko Jumbie wear?

Errol Hill and Daniel Crowley described the Trinidad costume as boldly striped stilts, a long full skirt reaching the ground, an Eton jacket of bright satin or velvet, and an admiral’s hat with long peaks front and back decorated with feathers. Crowley noted the hat was shaped from tosho, the dried pulp of the wild cucumber. The face and hands were covered so the masquerader could not be identified.

Did the Moko Jumbie tradition almost die out?

Yes. Crowley called the Trinidad moko jumbie virtually extinct in 1956, and the practice survived mainly in memory for decades. It was deliberately revived from 1975 onward by Dexter Stewart in Point Fortin, by Glen de Souza in Cocorite from 1986, and by Junior Bisnath in San Fernando from 1995, whose group gathered over five hundred stilt walkers in one place in 2017.

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