Bahamas culture and heritage - junkanoo

No one knows precisely when Junkanoo (originally spelled “John Canoe”) started, or where the name comes from. Historians have suggested that the celebration honours a successful black merchant by the name of John Connu or Conny, who lived along the Guinea Coast of Africa around 1720. More generally, the earliest forms of the masquerade appear to draw on traditions from West Africa. Masqueraders, according to the first information of John Canoe in the Bahamas dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries..