Strum Strumps and Sangamentos: The Banjo in Hans Sloane’s Voyage to the Islands (1707) and the Iberian Substratum in Black Carnival/Masquerade Traditions in the Americas

Rory Corbett

Published in: Ethnomusicology Ireland 10 (2025), pp. xxxx.

ISSN 2009-4094

Article Date: 30 June 2025

Abstract

The earliest visual evidence of the musical instrument known as a banjo today features in a 1707 natural history publication by Hans Sloane. In his narrative account, Sloane associates this musical instrument with a slave festival that he attended in Jamaica in 1688–9. Where others suggest that this event was an early version of the late-eighteenth-century Afro-Jamaican carnival/masquerade tradition known as jonkonnu, in this article I instead identify the slave festival that Sloane attended as a localised variant ofa Central African mock-war ritual known as a sangamento in the Iberian Atlantic world. I do so by highlighting key similarities between the performance practices and costumes of participants at this late-seventeenth-century Afro-Jamaican festival and sangamentos documented in West-Central Africa and in Iberian plantation colonies in the Americas as far back as the fifteenth century. As a counter to the scholarly tendency to treat these types of events as “secular” traditions, the paper also explores the important role that Afro-Catholic fraternal organisations known as Black Brotherhoods played in the historical development of Afro-American carnivals/masquerades in the colonial period.

Keywords: banjo, Hans Sloane, sangamento, calenda, Kongo Kingdom, Black Brotherhoods

https://doi.org/10.64208/FFKB4411

Author: Rory Corbett

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3212-4660

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