Winti music is the ceremonial music of the Afro-Surinamese Winti possession tradition. The core instruments are apinti (hand-struck carved wooden drums), agida (a large upright barrel drum and the ritual's most important instrument), pudja (short carved small drums), and kwakwa (a wooden slapstick). A lead singer calls in Sranan Tongo and a group answers. Meter uses 3-against-2 or compound-6/8 patterns; tempo accelerates as the ritual proceeds, priming the transition to possession. Melodies use restricted five-to-seven-note scales, and lyrics address ancestor spirits (yorka), Winti spirits, and deities such as Kra and Adjai. Vocabulary often draws on ritual-specific Kromanti terms deliberately opaque to outsiders. Winti music sits alongside Haitian Vodou, Cuban Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé in the broader Atlantic Afro-religious ceremonial-music map.

From the late seventeenth century, Suriname received hundreds of thousands of enslaved people from West Africa — Ghana, Benin, and Nigeria in particular — into Dutch sugar-plantation slavery. Their ethnic religions (Kromanti, Fon, Yoruba, etc.) fused in Suriname to produce Winti. Escapees who built inland Maroon communities (Ndyuka, Saramaka, Aluku) preserved more West-African-adjacent ritual forms, while Paramaribo's urban Creoles urbanised Winti under Western contact. In 1874 the Dutch colonial administration criminalised Winti as 'witchcraft' — the informal prohibition dates further back to 1774 — and the ban was not lifted until 1971. Across nearly two centuries of prohibition, Winti music transmitted through household ritual and clandestine gatherings.

Follow the agida first. This upright barrel drum is the ritual's central instrument; the lead drummer plays with bare hands to the drum's centre, providing the low-frequency backbone of the ceremonial space. Then apinti's rapid high patterns and the kwakwa's dry percussive accents fill the layered rhythmic bed. Vocally, the lead-caller / group-response structure repeats across dozens of minutes with gradual tempo acceleration — this acceleration is the musical infrastructure of the ritual's climactic possession phase. Naks's 1970s–80s recordings capture the publicly performable portion of the tradition, adapted for the concert-hall stage, and offer the best accessible non-ritual entry point.

Studio recordings of full Winti ritual are limited by the tradition's private nature, but Naks's 1970s–80s recordings (including 'Winti Prei' and 'Apinti Songs') offer the most accessible entry. These document the publicly performable subset. Academically, ethnomusicologist Kenneth Bilby's Smithsonian Folkways and Library of Congress recordings of Maroon Winti music are indispensable. As an indirect modern entry, Kenny B's 'Winti Flow' (2018) folds Winti vocabulary into contemporary Surinamese pop.

'Winti' means 'wind' in Sranan Tongo, corresponding to the ritual conception that spirits descend upon people like the wind. Paramaribo urban Winti addresses multiple hierarchical deities — Kra (personal-fate spirit), Aisa (earth goddess), Papa Winti (male spirit), Adjai (forest spirit) — each with dedicated drum patterns and songs. Maroon Winti (Ndyuka, Saramaka, Aluku) preserves stronger direct continuity with West African Akan (Ashanti) forms. The 1971 lifting of the ban preceded Surinamese independence by four years and provided cultural infrastructure for the independence movement.