Cumbia is a musical genre and folk dance from Panama. The cultural importance of cumbia has been recognized by UNESCO in its inclusion of it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2018. The inscription describes cumbia as "the festive and ritual expressions of the Congo culture [Afro-Panamanian culture] of Panama". Etymology Panamanian musician Narciso Garay, in his book "Tradiciones y Cantares de Panamá", published in 1930, assumed that the word cumbia shares the same linguistic root of the word cumbé, dance of African origin registered in the dictionary of the Spanish language as dance of black people Colombian folklorist Delia Zapata Olivella in her publication of 1962, ('Cumbia: Musical Synthesis of the Colombian Nation, Historical and Choreographic Review') notes that the only word similar to cumbia present in the dictionary of the Real Academia de la Lengua Española, is "a dance of African origin and the musical interpretation of this dance." And that (without acute accent) is used for black people living in Bata, in Spanish continental Guinea (now Equatorial Guinea). The Colombian cultural researcher Jorge Villarreal Diazgranados in his article "La cumbia, el jolgorio y sobre todo el placer" (La cumbia, fun and above all pleasure), published in 1977 states: An English translation of the quote above would be: Musicologist and folk-researcher Guillermo Abadía Morales, in his 1977 "Compendio general de folclore colombiano" (General Compendium of Colombian folklore), says that cumbia is a shortened form of cumbancha, a word whose root is Kumba, Mandinka demonym, and adds that the Republic of the Congo was called Cumba. Cuban ethnologist Graciano states that the words Kumba, Kumbe and Koumbi, replacing the letter "k" for "c" (when turned into Spanish) means "drums" or "dances". He adds that cumbé, cumbia and cumba were drums of African origin in the Antilles. On the other hand, he states that cumba - kumba, African word for Bantu or Congo tribes, means "roar", "shock", "shouting", "scandal", "joy". The Panamanian folklorist Manuel Zarate adds to this theory in his "Tambor y Socavón" (Drum and Tunnel), as the root of the word cumbia. Also, for Ortiz, among congos, nkumbi is a drum. Regarding the word cumbé the 22nd version of the , published in 2001, it is recorded as "" ('Dance of Equatorial Guinea') and "" ('Music of this dance'). In 2006, Colombian musician and musicologist Guillermo Carbo Ronderos said that the etymology