The gumbe (also spelled goombay or gumbay) is a square frame drum, large enough in some versions for the player to sit on, with a single goatskin head. It was created centuries ago by enslaved Africans in Jamaica, where it became central to Jamaican Maroon culture — communities of escaped enslaved people who maintained independent strongholds in the island’s mountains and used the gumbe’s sound, played to induce trance, for communication, ancestral connection, and reportedly even warning of planned attacks during their wars with British colonial forces.

After the Second Maroon War (1795–96), roughly 550 Maroons were exiled — first to Nova Scotia, then in 1800 around 400 of them on to the newly founded settlement of Freetown, Sierra Leone. They brought the gumbe with them, and it became a foundational instrument of Krio culture, the Creole society that formed in Freetown from Maroon, liberated-African, and local populations. Over the 19th century it became closely associated with “gumbe dancing,” popular enough that colonial newspapers warned against it on moral grounds. Today it remains a living tradition — Sierra Leone’s “New School” musicians, blending gumbe and the related milo jazz style (built on stone-filled tin cans) with Afrobeat, hip-hop, and reggae, while the instrument itself maintains its older, more traditional uses as well.