The Sanctuary Tin — Maam of the Set Girls

In eighteenth-century Jamaica, groups of enslaved and free women took to the streets each Christmas season in processions of striking beauty — and they made everything themselves. From what they were given and what they could quietly obtain. Coarse linen. Calico. Ribbons saved from a mistress's discarded dress. Beads, shiny trimmings, pieces of looking-glass. Sturdy fabric, transformed in secret over weeks, into something that declared: wi likkle but wi tallawah.

They called themselves the Set Girls, and they named their sets after jewels — Garnet, Ruby, Pearl. Each group wore matching colours, composed their own songs, and paraded alongside the Jonkonnu bands — the masquerade tradition carried from West Africa to Jamaica in the spiritual memory of the enslaved. Jonkonnu itself was rooted in Egungun, the ancestral masquerade of the Yoruba people, which held that the dead do not leave — they transform, and it is the duty of the living to keep them present. At the front of each set walked an older woman called the Maam: the one who remembered the most, the living link between the women marching and the women they were honouring.

What they made, they made in private. Away from colonial eyes — intimate, deliberate, held quietly between women before it ever met the world. That impulse never left. It moved, as these things do, from woman to woman — from the street into the home, into every room where precious things were kept carefully and the photographs of the people you love, living and gone, were placed somewhere they could still be seen.

In Egungun tradition, the ancestors are not separate from the living. The lineage is not a line that ends. It moves, and it holds everyone in it.