Mijikenda (Wanika)

Source term: Schwirrhölzer

Among the Wanika of the Kenyan coast — the cluster of peoples later grouped as the Mijikenda — the bull-roarer was swung to produce the droning of a Waldteufel, a forest-devil of the bush. The German ethnologist Heinrich Schurtz noted the practice only in passing, in his 1902 study of age-classes and men's societies, and as evidence for an argument: that across nearly all of Africa the men's secret societies survived only at the worn outer edge of their belt as decayed offshoots, where the institutions themselves had wasted away and only their props remained. The existence of such societies, he wrote, was often betrayed by nothing more than the masks that had reached European museums by chance, or by the bull-roarers with which the Wanika of the East Coast knew how to summon the forest-devil's voice. Schurtz took the Wanika from the explorer Johann Maria Hildebrandt, who travelled the region in the 1870s and recorded their three graded classes, the Aniere, Kambi, and Mvaya, into which a man rose only by paying out heavy dues in feasting.

Schwirrhölzer, mit denen z. B. die Wanika der Ostküste das Gebrumme eines Waldteufels hervorzubringen wissen.

bull-roarers, with which, for example, the Wanika of the East Coast know how to produce the droning of a forest-devil.

Schurtz, Altersklassen und Männerbünde (1902:439)

Particulars

Object

Bull-roarers with which the Wanika of the East Coast produce the roar of a forest-spirit (Waldteufel).

Function

Sounded as the voice of a forest-spirit (Waldteufel) at the degraded fringe of the secret-society belt.