The Bullroarer Atlas

AFR-004 - ethnographic attestation

Verre / Momi

Nigeria - Adamawa - Cholli Verre region - Africa

Restricted

A wooden blade with cord wound around its middle and a loose hank trailing toward the tip — a generic type, not the baranga whirled at night...
Representative image. A wooden blade with cord wound around its middle and a loose hank trailing toward the tip — a generic type, not the baranga whirled at night during the Verre harvest rite of Nenga Kabusum. © The Trustees of the British Museum (E/Af1952-07-142) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

baranga; Nenga Kabusum English

Source term: baranga; wooden bull-roarers

baranga (pl.): the Verre term for the metal and wooden bullroarers kept among the Do'os cult objects, whirled at the night harvest rite Nenga Kabusum.

Among the Verre of Cholli, a settlement of smiths in the Adamawa highlands of Nigeria, the cult house called lug Do'os held five things: a stone inside a skin bag, a long deep-throated wooden horn, animal-horn pipes, iron ceremonial instruments, and bull-roarers of metal and wood known as baranga. The wooden ones were whirled in Nenga Kabusum, a penultimate stage of the harvest-cycle of festivals that took place at night, "when the Do'os 'takes hunger and throws it away into the bush'"; women had to remain indoors throughout, while the men beat stones, gourds, and pots and sounded the bull-roarers in the dark. Do'os was the men's cult complex held to be the direct source of good crop yields, health, and age-grade status — "secret from women and children," in the words of Clement Wiu, a Verre seminarian who wrote on it for a theology thesis. An earlier observer, C. K. Meek, had recorded the smiths' night rites in his 1931 account, when whirring iron bull-roarers and iron rattles accompanied the horns — instruments Meek judged identical to those of the neighbouring Chamba Leko voma cults. Tim Chappel collected from this community in 1966.

Nenga Kabusum took place at night, when the Do’os ‘takes hunger and throws it away into the bush’; women must remain indoors throughout; it involves a deep-throated horn (gourd horn?), the beating of stones, gourds, and pots, as well as the whirring of wooden bull-roarers.

Chappel, Fardon & Piepel 2021, "Surviving Works: context in Verre arts," Vestiges 7(1)
Object
Wooden bullroarers are whirled in Nenga Kabusum, a nocturnal harvest-cycle rite of the Do'os complex.
Function
Chappel, Fardon, and Piepel record baranga as Do'os bullroarers and describe Nenga Kabusum as a night harvest-cycle rite where women remain indoors and wooden bull-roarers are whirled.
Map confidence
medium - representative coordinate for named people/region; source does not warrant a ritual-site point
Source location
Chappel, Fardon, and Piepel 2021 ch. 1.1, ch. 1.3, glossary app. 3

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