The phrase appears in
Charles Dickens'
Little Dorrit, originally published in serial form between 1855 and 1857. "He never dreamed of disputing their pretensions, but did homage to the miserable Mumbo jumbo they paraded." It also appears in
Thomas Hardy's
A Pair of Blue Eyes published in 1873. 'A cracked edifice was a species of Mumbo Jumbo'. First published in 1899,
The Story of Little Black Sambo has a titular protagonist whose parents are named "Black Mumbo" and "Black Jumbo". While the novel quotes this dictionary entry and includes a lengthy bibliography, the work is largely fictional and regularly blurs the line between fact and fiction. The title can also be interpreted to refer to the notion that postmodern works like
Mumbo Jumbo are often dismissed as nonsensical.
The Story of an African Farm, an 1883 novel by
Olive Schreiner, refers to half of a "Mumboo-jumbow idol [that] leaves us utterly in the dark as to what the rest was like." Its reference symbolizes the confusion and lack of descriptiveness that came from such an idol. In his preface to
Frantz Fanon's
The Wretched of the Earth,
Jean-Paul Sartre uses the phrase when speaking of revolutionary violence being diverted into native African religion: "Mumbo-Jumbo and all the idols of the tribe come down among them, rule over their violence and waste it in trances until it is exhausted". In
Vachel Lindsay's poem
The Congo, Mumbo Jumbo is used as a metaphor for the pagan religion followed by the Africans he encounters. The poem, at the end of each of three sections, repeats the phrase "Mumbo Jumbo will hoodoo you". In
Stranger In A Strange Land by
Robert Heinlein, the character
Jubal Harshaw speaks of Mumbo Jumbo as the "God of the Congo" towards the end of the novel in a discourse on the meaning of religions. In
Roots by
Alex Haley, the Mumbo Jumbo is also mentioned in the context of tribal men disciplining disobedient wives. In the 1928 novel
The Twelve Chairs, when describing the limited vocabulary of one character, it is stated that "The lexicon of a Negro from the cannibalistic tribe Mumbo-Jumbo comprises three hundred words." ==See also==