Kongo (Bakongo)

ngwingwingwe

Source term: rhombe / ngwingwingwe

ngwingwingwe — the Kongo name (around San Salvador) for the bamboo or wooden bull-roarer; recorded by Weeks as the local term for the whirled plaything.

Among the Kongo around San Salvador (Mbanza Kongo), the bull-roarer was a blade of bamboo or wood whirled on a cord, and by the time the Baptist missionary John H. Weeks recorded it in the early 1900s it was regarded only as a plaything. Women, men, and children alike would put their hands over their faces when someone approached twirling one — for fear, Weeks judged, of the many accidents caused by the blade coming off its string and flying into a bystander's face. Bertil Söderberg, cataloguing the instruments of the Lower Congo decades later, saw in the toy a secret instrument of initiation rites that had passed to the children.

There is a bull-roarer (Ngwingwingwe) made from a bamboo or a piece of wood. It is regarded only as a plaything. Women, and also men and children, put their hands over their faces when a person approaches who is twirling one of them, but this appears to be only from fear of the many accidents due to bull-roarers coming off their strings, and flying into the faces of those who happen to be near.

Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (1914), p. 126

Particulars

Object

Bamboo or wood blade on a cord.

Function

'Regarded only as a plaything'; bystanders shield faces for fear of the blade flying off (Weeks).