EXH2026-011 - ethnographic attestation
Kongo (Bakongo)
Angola - San Salvador - Mbanza Kongo - Central Africa
Play / practical
ngwingwingwe French/English
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. Weeks noted that women, men, and children alike would put their hands over their faces when someone approached twirling one, not, he judged, out of any sacred dread, but from fear of the many accidents caused by the blade coming off its string and flying into a bystander's face. Bertil Soderberg, cataloguing the instruments of the Lower Congo decades later, suggested the toy may once have been a secret instrument tied to initiation rites before it 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
- 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).
- Map confidence
- high - Mbanza Kongo (San Salvador), stated locality
- Source location
- Soderberg p. 185; Weeks 1914 p. 126
- Toy / secular survival