Mumbo Jumbo

Papa LaBas, a houngan in the Voodoo tradition, clings to mystical practices in his efforts to heal his community. However, with the onset of the 1920s and the Harlem Renaissance, there is a youth movement to modernize the struggle for Black advancement. Earline tells LaBas that the community “need[s] scientists and engineers, [it] need[s] lawyers” (26).

As the novel progresses, LaBas becomes more introspective about his resistance to modernization. By Chapter 12, he has grown “conscious of the contemporary” (49). Much later he turns inward and wonders, “Perhaps I have been insular […] limiting myself to a Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral, not allowing myself to witness the popular manifestations of The Work” (139). By the end of the novel, at age 100, he has embraced the radical change brought forth by the Black Power movement of the early 1970s.

According to the Oxford University Press, “Afrofuturism comprises cultural production and scholarly thought […] that imagine greater justice and a freer expression of black subjectivity in the future or in alternative places, times, or realities” (Oxford Bibliographies, August 2019). Throughout Mumbo Jumbo, the author offers an Afrocentric historical account as an alternative to the dominant Eurocentric