I’m working on some pages for my class this fall. Do take care, all who may come by here. Kumbaya . . . I don’t remember where I learned “Kumbaya” probably in church; but the most memorable performance I remember hearing was that of a Black South African minister at the 1954 National Convocation of Methodist Youth. I don’t remember his name. He drummed on a hymnbook as he sang, and the rhythms were a little diffrerent from those we hear today. We had watched a film of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country.

The origins of “Kumbaya” are disputed, but it seems fairly clear that it migrated from the American south to Africa before it got to me. I was taught that Kumbaya (or Kum Bah Yah) meant “come by here;” but of course as we sang it in the sixties it came to mean “peace.” That’s why today’s fashionable rightist cynicism has developed the familiar trope that sneers at “Kumbaya” in order to sneer at the idea of community. One sneers at ‘holding hands and singing “Kumbaya”‘ in order to proclaim one’s tough minded (individualistic, gun-carrying, etc.) patriotism in the post 9/11 political arena.

It’s a miserable and quite mindless cliché. The South African minister who so moved me in 1954 sang “Kumbaya” as an evocation of solidarity in opposition to Apartheid and in praise of what we used to call brotherhood. These are not foolish things. What is foolish and shameful is today’s strident patriotism, the first (not the last as Dr. Johnson had it) refuge of scoundrels.