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A Straight Dope Classic from Cecil's Storehouse of Human KnowledgeWhat does "kumbaya" mean?
September 11, 1998
Dear Cecil:
This has probably been answered somewhere before, but I was getting my teeth drilled that day. Just what does kumbaya mean?
Cecil replies:
Oh Lord, kumbaya. Also spelled kum ba yah, cumbayah, kumbayah, and probably a few other ways. If you look in a good songbook you'll find the word helpfully translated as "come by here," with the note that the song is "from Angola, Africa." The "come by here" part I'll buy. But Angola? Someone's doubtin', Lord, for the obvious reason that kumbaya is way too close to English to have a strictly African origin. More likely, I told my assistant Jane, it comes from some African-English pidgin or creole--that is, a combination of languages. (A pidgin is a linguistic makeshift that enables two cultures to communicate for purposes of trade, etc.; a creole is a pidgin that has become a culture's primary language.) Sure enough, when we look into the matter, we find this conjecture is on the money. Someone's grinnin', Lord, kumbaya.
Kumbaya apparently originated with the Gullah, an African-American people living on the Sea Islands and adjacent coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia. (The best known Sea Island is Hilton Head, the resort area.) Having lived in isolation for hundreds of years, the Gullah speak a dialect that most native speakers of English find unintelligible on first hearing but that turns out to be heavily accented English with other stuff mixed in. The dialect appears in Joel Chandler Harris's "Uncle Remus" stories, to give you an idea what it sounds like. In the 1940s the pioneering linguist Lorenzo Turner showed that the Gullah language was actually a creole consisting of English plus a lot of words and constructions from the languages of west Africa, the Gullahs' homeland. Although long scorned as an ignorant caricature of English, Gullah is actually a language of considerable charm, with expressions like (forgive my poor attempt at expressing these phonetically) deh clin, dawn (literally "day clean"); troot mout, truthful person ("truth mouth"), and tebble tappuh, preacher ("table tapper").
And of course there's kumbayah. According to ethnomusicologist Thomas Miller, the song we know began as a Gullah spiritual. Some recordings of it were made in the 1920s, but no doubt it goes back earlier. Published versions began appearing in the 1930s. It's believed an American missionary couple taught the song to the locals in Angola, where its origins were forgotten. The song was then rediscovered in Angola and brought back here in time for the folksinging revival of the 50s and 60s. People might have thought the Gullahs talked funny, but we owe them a vote of thanks. Can you imagine sitting around the campfire singing, "Oh, Lord, come by here"?
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a980911a.html
And here's an excerpt from "Talkin And Testifyin-The Language of Black America" {Geneva Smitherman, Wayne State University Press, 1977, pps.14, 15}:
"Our look at the history of Black English would be incomplete without attention to the special case of Gullah Creole. This dialect, also known as Geechee speech, is spoken by rural and urban blacks who live in the areas along the Atlantic coastal region of South Carolina and georgia. While some Geechees inhabit the Sea Islands along the coast, many also live around Charleston and Beufort. Most of the ancestprs of these blacks were brought direct from Nigeria, Liberia, Gambia, Sieraa Leone, and other places in West Africa where Ibo, Yoruba, Mandingo, Wolof, and other West African languages were and are still spoken. Today, Gullah people form a special Black Amerian communitiy because they have retained considerable African language and cultural patterns. Even the names Gullah and Geechee are African in origin-they refer to languages and tribes from Liberia...
In black linguist Lorenzo Turner's fifteen-year study of this dialect, he found not only fundamental African survivals in sound and syntax, but nearly 6,000 West African words used in personal names and nicknames, in songs, and stories, as well as in everyday conversation. It is important for our understanding of Black English to recognize that black speech outside of Geechee areas was undoubtedly once highly similar to Gullah and is now simply at a later stage in teh de-creolization process, For example, both Gulah and non-Gullah blacks still use the Westr African pattern of introducing the subject and repeating it with a personal pronoun. Thus, the Gullah speaker says, "De man and his wife hanging to the tree, they licked to pieces." {The man and his wife hanging to the tree, they were licked to pieces."}. The non-Gullah speaker handles the subject in the same way: "Yesterday, the whole family, they move to the West Side." On the other hand, only Gullah blacks still use the West African pattern of placing the adjective after the noun: "day clean broad". Other speakers of Black English follow the same pattern as White English speakers: "Broad daylight".
We can say, then, that contemporarary Black English looks back to an African linguistic tradition which was modified on Amerian soil. While historial records and documents reveal a good deal about the development and change of this Africanized English, there is much that the rcords don't tell us. As a former slave said, "Everything I tells you am the truth, but they's plenty I can't tell you."