Colonel Sterling laments end of Jonkunnu in Moore Town

The Jonkunnu festivity at Moore Town, a Maroon village in East Portland’s Rio Grande Valley, has died a slow, natural death — leaving residents with a quiet resolve.

Colonel of the Moore Town Maroons, Wallace Sterling, recalled that Jonkunnu once animated the Christmas season with costumed characters roaming the villages. They sang, danced and, as he put it, “would oftentimes frighten children and even adults during their performances.”

The masqueraders did not confine themselves to Moore Town. Sterling noted that “some would even go into the town of Port Antonio, probably a week leading up to Christmas and after,” continuing their revelry until New Year’s Day.

Today, however, the tradition has vanished.

“Sad to say that it now a thing of the past,” Sterling admitted. The younger generation, he explained, prefers other diversions, while villagers spend more time indoors preparing meals and gathering with family. “So it is a whole new change and that part of our culture has seemingly died.”

Once, eleven principal characters animated the spectacle: the belly woman, the devil, cow head, jack-in-the-green, the policeman, and the king and queen. Their grotesque costumes and satirical dances mocked authority and hierarchy, a cultural inheritance from Africa. Jonkunnu itself dates back to slavery, adapted from the African festival of the same name. Enslaved Jamaicans used the masquerade as biting parody of colonial power, each figure symbolising aspects of oppression.

Moore Town’s history lends weight to this decline. Established in 1740 after the treaty between the British and the Windward Maroons, it became a stronghold of autonomy in the Blue and John Crow Mountains. The Maroons—descendants of Africans who escaped slavery—secured land and self-rule, their culture preserved in drumming, oral tradition and ritual.

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