The Moko Jumbies of St. Croix Are a Towering Link to the Past
Spindly and sky-high, the costumed stilt walkers crossed oceans to become a Caribbean festival fixture.
Your first time on stilts can be intimidating. Your ankles are stiff and strapped in; your brain can’t comprehend what’s happening. Your desire, I’m told, has to be stronger than your fear. But once that desire wins out and you launch yourself to your feet, stretching up to 15 feet in the air and dressed head to toe in bright madras prints or raffia skirts that flutter in the wind, miracles can occur.
Now you’re a Moko Jumbie, stomping, bending over backwards, gyrating, lifting your legs, and holding in place. With the addition of stilts, you’ve transitioned from human to an embodiment of spirits, a soaring godlike form with roots all over the African continent conferred upon to carry the mantle of ancestry. They also played a sociological role, assisting in rites of passage within the community. Using their height to keep a lookout and wearing mirrors to ward off evil, Moko Jumbies are protectors, towering above the villages they shield with a revered omnipotence.
“In [African] spiritual ceremonies, these would be guardians,” says Willard John, founder of the nonprofit Guardians of Culture Moko Jumbies in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands. “They covered their bodies completely, because they represented a higher power. You need not see a human.”
When enslaved peoples were transported from Africa and forced to labor in the Caribbean, so too came their Moko Jumbies (some say the giants walked through the ocean). But in order to continue the tradition, they had to alter their public-facing meaning. “The plantation owners did not allow the Africans to practice their Indigenous religions,” says John. “So the Moko Jumbie had to be camouflaged, put in a different context in order for it to be acceptable.”
The name also hails from an amalgamation of African and West Indian cultures. In Central Africa, “moko” meant healer. “Jumbie” was added later—the West Indian term for ghost or spirit, it’s thought to have roots in the Kongo language.
Spiritual African Moko Jumbies thus became celebratory entities, first spotted at gatherings on plantations then later giving dimension to street festivals after emancipation. Over the centuries, their costumes grew more colorful and festive, but they never lost sight of their history, their traditional plain potato sack repurposed into plumage.
In St. Croix, you can see Moko Jumbies at least three times a week during the holiday season. And they’re even more prevalent when the Crucian Christmas Festival, which runs from December 26 through January 9, kicks off, in addition to seasonal jump ups and events like the Coconut Festival in early December. You’ll also find them every Wednesday at 7 pm at the Palms Restaurant at the Pelican Cove hotel. Or swing by the Schjang Ballpark in Estate St. John on Saturday mornings from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm, and you can watch John’s proteges, some of whom have been with him for decades from the age of 10, practice their performances. Maybe you’ll even be inspired to try it yourself.
“The first time on the stilts was one of the most exciting times of my life,” says John. “Scary as well, but I felt the spiritualism.”
At 84 or so square miles, St. Croix is the largest of the Virgin Islands, a paradise of soft white sand, lush rainforest, and turquoise blue waters fringed with colorful coral reefs. A 15-minute flight or 2-hour ferry from St. Thomas, it provides an alluring air of seclusion, especially for high profile visitors. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a chain hotel, it’s the domain of stalwarts like the family-owned Buccaneer Hotel, and boutique establishments like the historic King Christian Hotel and oceanfront Waves Cane Bay. Over the years the island has been a haunt for Marilyn Monroe, NBA player Tim Duncan, Danish comedian and pianist Victor Borge, and Hollywood starlet Maureen O’Hara, who published Virgin Islands Magazine, managed a Caribbean commuter plane service, and acted as John Wayne’s point of contact during his visits. And it’s currently attracting the likes of President Biden, who traditionally visits during the festive holiday season.
Five years after the Rockefeller Brothers Fund donated over half of St. John to the US government to create the US Virgin Islands National Park in 1956, President Kennedy established Buck Island Reef National Monument off of St. Croix, which boasts one of the nation's three snorkel trails within its reef. (There are underwater plaques and everything.) Along with Buck Island, national parks on St. Croix include Christiansted National Historic Site, which delves into the economic workings of the Danish, and Salt River Bay National Historical Park and Ecological Preserve, home to a bioluminescent bay with kayaking tours.
Given its beauty, it’s no wonder St. Croix has been under seven flags: Spanish, English and Dutch (simultaneously), French, Danish, Maltese, and finally, the US. But throughout each occupation, those who were brought there against their will remained strong.
Remnants of St. Croix’s turbulent past are visible above ground by way of defunct sugar mills, as well as underwater in the form of shipwrecks, where archeological work is being conducted by the Slave Wrecks Project at Christensted and Buck Island. The Estate Little Princess, now home to the Nature Conservancy, was once a plantation that housed the island’s sole Africans-only hospital, as well as a space where the enslaved lived, worked, raised livestock, made pottery, got married, had children, and, in short, created lives, from 1749 until 1848. Sections of the estate are now an archeological site, where everyday items like pottery shards and fish bones are uncovered in an effort to reconstruct lives once lived.
And then there are people like Willard John, stewards of St. Croix committed to keeping the culture alive. Throughout the rest of the Caribbean, the presence of Moko Jumbies faded for decades until a fierce revival brought them back to the fore in the 1990s, but in the Virgin Islands, they never left. Here, Moko Jumbies have ardently watched over their ward for the last 200 years.
And while most images of Moko Jumbies reflect the glittery, flamboyant stars of world-famous carnivals in places like Antigua, Trinidad, St. Vincent, St. Kitts, and Barbados, John is more concerned with preserving history than invoking celebratory flair. It’s an effort to rectify what he realized was never taught as a Virgin Islander attending an HBCU in Pennsylvania. “It was an international school—there were students from all over, particularly Africa,” he recalls. “We would sit around and talk about our culture and history, but I didn’t know a lot about mine, because they didn’t teach me that in school.”
When John returned home, he was determined to immerse himself in the culture of the Virgin Islands. His cousin convinced him to join the Moko Jumbies in St. Thomas, and when he moved to St. Croix in 1979, the stilt walkers came with him. Soon after, he began the Guardians of the Moko Jumbies to keep the legacy alive, and the rest is, well, history.
“I think what makes me different is I’m a traditionalist,” he says. “I like to remind people from whence it comes, [and] I try to emphasize a lot of the Africanisms of this art form. In other locations you might see a guy dancing without even a shirt on—that’s not bad, that’s just the way they want to do it!”
In contrast to those bare-chested performers, John’s Moko Jumbies cover their entire bodies, including their faces, just like their African ancestors. “With their faces covered, you really feel the mysticism,” he says.
But this strict adherence to custom does get some pushback, sometimes from his own young Moko Jumbies. “My kids, they don’t want to wear masks, they want everybody to see who they are,” he says. “But I don’t allow it—I want to make sure people understand where it comes from.”