The Bullroarer Atlas

No. BATCH4-015

G|ui, the elders’ secret summons

Botswana · Central Kalahari Reserve · Southern Africa

Restricted

Nurse’s drawing of a G/wi feather-bladed gíg/ù, with a dark tapered feather suspended by a curved cord from a long stick.
Plate I. G/wi feather-bladed gíg/ù, from Nurse's 1972 survey of Central Kalahari instruments. Image source
San thunder stick from Oas, Omaheke: a broad wooden blade with a rounded end, leather thong wound near the tapered end and a short connected stick below.
Plate II. Representative — not this record’s object. San wooden bullroarer from Omaheke/Oas in the Kalahari. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Image source
A G/wi g/ang/an from the Central Kalahari, with a long handle, connecting lace and feathered rotor.
Plate III. A G/wi g/ang/an from the Central Kalahari — bowed handle, leather lace, feather-tipped rotor. Image source

gíg/ù

Source term: bull-roarer

gíg/ù: Nurse's G/wi-G//ana name for the feather-bladed bullroarer, with high tone on the i. The Geneva museum labels its G/wi specimen g/ang/an.

A G|ui man who caught a kori bustard could roast it, hide it in a tree, then slip out at night as though going to the toilet. He lit a little fire and swung a bullroarer: the old men understood and ran through the darkness to eat. Kireho told Kazuyoshi Sugawara this secret summons belonged to horoha, a men’s initiation whose name meant having the bustard’s crest. Sugawara and Jiro Tanaka arranged a reenactment in 1984. Children had bullroarers too. G. T. Nurse watched G/wi and G//ana boys whirl a rotor tipped with a trimmed korhaan tail feather while girls and boys clapped, hummed or sang. The adults found his wish to buy one ridiculous: these were children’s things, though men made them.

A bull-roarer ... was played only by young boys. It was capable of being whirled around in several different rhythms.

Nurse, African Music 5.2 (1972), p. 26.

Particulars

Object
A slender 30 cm handle with about 5 cm of free leather lace and a thinner 15 cm rotor tipped with a carefully trimmed korhaan tail feather.
Function
Children's rhythmic toy among the G/wi and G//ana; among the G|ui, a secret signal of the men's horoha initiation, calling elders to a kori-bustard feast.

Sources

  1. Kazuyoshi Sugawara, “The Emergence of the Past in ‘Now-and-Here’ through Narratives: Discourse Analysis among the G|ui Foragers,” Intercultural Communication Review 13 (2015), pp. 7-20, at pp. 13-15
  2. G. T. Nurse, “Musical Instrumentation among the San (Bushmen) of the Central Kalahari,” African Music 5(2) (1972), pp. 23-27, at p. 26, fig. 4 View
  3. Musée d'ethnographie de Genève, ETHMU 040238

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.