Nymah Kumah moves on
By Chris King
Of the St. Louis American
I bumped into an old friend, Thomas Sleet, at an art opening two weeks ago. We talked about art and conflicts in the community. Sleet said that what people around here need is more of Nymah Kumah.
Nymah Kumah was a West African elder I used to bring to St. Louis from Massachusetts. Among many other things, he was a drummer, singer and storyteller. While in town, Nymah would co-teach my African cluster at Lindenwood College, perform at a public venue and visit at people’s homes.
I always insisted on the home visits. Nymah described his culture as a Stone Age culture. He grew up in rural West Africa, as a Grebo man. The Grebo had been passing on their culture face to face, elder to child, for centuries. I wanted people in St. Louis to experience Nymah as one should – as I had – in an intimate domestic setting, not in a theater or classroom.
Sleet took advantage of the opportunity. Sleet plays drums, and at the time he was making masks. He and Nymah really hit it off. I wasn’t surprised to find that Nymah had stayed deep inside Sleet’s heart, though they hadn’t seen each other in 10 years. Sleet said his son, now a grown teenager, was still listening to the record my buddy Lij and I made for Nymah all those years ago.
This made me so proud. Nymah’s recording was our first project in what became the arts collective Hoobellatoo – the name is our spelling for a word in his language, Gebo, which means “wonderful people.” Our first guiding mission was to put wonderful people like Nymah into wider circulation. With Sleet and his kid, it actually had worked.
Right after bumping into Sleet, I called Nymah where he lived, in Acton, Massachusetts, to tell him the story. He was very happy to be remembered in St. Louis. Nymah loved St. Louis – the people, the stone churches, especially the pace of life, which is so much more sane than in suburban Boston. Moving him to St. Louis was one of my dreams and intentions after moving home from New York myself two years ago.
As always, on the phone Nymah Kumah sounded so alive and so thrilled to be alive. We sang snippets of Grebo songs together. My favorite song to sing over the phone with Nymah translates into English as “Let’s Get Up and Go Now,” which has a thrilling melody to power its literally uplifting message.
Never would I have believed, when I put down the phone that night, that Nymah would be dead within two weeks. Sleet’s friend and mine died Friday, November 10, 2006, in Acton, Massachusetts, where he lived. His precise age was somewhat uncertain, but he was in his mid-to-late 80s.
A news obituary about Nymah Kumah would talk about his performance in the African Pavilion at the historic World’s Fair in New York City in 1964. It would summarize his years dancing onstage for Babatunde Olatunji, one of the first important popularizers of West African performance in the West. It would mention his years as a living folklore docent at the Museum of Natural History when the pioneering social scientist Margaret Meade was there.
But Nymah didn’t live on his old headlines. He wasn’t a walking press kit of himself. He was this serious, simple, hilarious, complex, open, mysterious, adorable old dude from a Stone Age culture who could hang just as comfortably at a hippie commune, in the black ghetto, in a fine art museum, or at your kitchen table.
Lij and I used to joke that our first production project together was recording the original man. Except, it wasn’t really a joke.
The original man is not dead, now. He has just moved on. Nymah Kumah’s name meant “In the Beginning to Save Life.” He was a man of origins and instigating life. His father had the same name. So does his son. The traditional Grebo people believe the soul keeps circulating on Earth after the body is lifeless. Nymah Kumah believed this. I have looked deep into his Stone Age eyes when he talked about these things. If any religious person was ever correct about anything, then Nymah Kumah was correct about the circulation of the soul.
Nymah Kumah is still in circulation.
Friday night, the night Nymah died, before I knew he had died, I looked through an old sketchbook. I never look at my old sketches. I only looked at them that night because a friend had invited me to submit some work to help him fill out a show.
Trying to hook him up, I found a collection of drawings I had done of Nymah. They were from when we recorded him the first time, in his brother’s church in the black Boston ghetto of Roxbury. Nymah stood on the altar when we recorded him, and I had tried to sketch the strange sight of the original African man palming a drum while a pale Jesus Christ loomed behind him, crucified on a cross.
I picked out a few sketches of Nymah for the art show. I gathered these old images of my friend, which I had not touched in many years, just as his spirit was moving on.
At the time, I thought I was only gathering drawings. Now I know something else was going on.
“Come on!” the Grebo people sing, under the African moon. “Let’s get up and go, now! We have been too long sleeping on the ground!”
Nymah Kumah’s life work will continue to appear periodically in Living It and in the American’s Black History Month special sections.
