The Bullroarer Atlas

ANDERSSON1993-002 - museum specimen

Kota burnt-pattern bullroarer

Republic of the Congo - Kongo-Brazzaville - French Equatorial Africa (no locality recorded) - Central Africa

Sacred / spirit

A Gabonese bullroarer with a relief rib; not the Kota vinare (unphotographed).
Representative — not this record’s object. · A Gabonese bullroarer with a relief rib; not the Kota vinare (unphotographed). · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

Source term: vinare / bullroarer

vinare: the Swedish catalogue term for a bullroarer, not a local name — no Kota word is recorded. Kuta, Bakuta and Bakota are the museum's own earlier labels for the same people.

A small wooden plate, patterned all over with lines burnt into the grain, was swung around in the air at religious ceremonies until it sounded. It reached Stockholm with its cord snapped and knotted back on itself, and the museum's own cataloguer looked at what was left and said plainly what was wrong: for the thing to work, the cord would have to be a great deal longer than this. Nineteen centimetres of decorated wood and seventy-three centimetres of shortened string are the whole of what survives of a Kota instrument nobody recorded in use.

För att vinaren ska fungera måste snöret vara betydligt längre. Ljudet uppstår när plattan svingas runt i luften. Används vid religiösa ceremonier.

For the bullroarer to work, the cord has to be considerably longer. The sound arises when the plate is swung around in the air. Used at religious ceremonies.

SMVK / Etnografiska museet, object record 1993.06.0212
Object
SMVK 1993.06.0212: a wooden plate 19 cm long, 6.5 cm wide and 0.8 cm thick, decorated with pyrographed patterns burnt into the surface, carrying a cord that has snapped and been knotted back together; plate and surviving cord together measure 73 cm. No object photograph exists in the museum record.
Function
Used in religious ceremonies; the record states that the sound arises when the plate is swung around in the air, and adds that for the instrument to work the cord would have to be considerably longer than the broken and re-tied length that survives.
Map confidence
low - Broad Kota (Kuta/Bakota) culture-area anchor in the north-west of the Republic of the Congo, in the Cuvette-Ouest forest toward the Gabon border. The museum records only the country; no village, subgroup or findspot is given and none is inferred.
Source location
SMVK 1993.06.0212

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