EXH2026-041 - museum specimen
Bangba / Ngbaka (Kereboro, Haut-Uele)
Democratic Republic of the Congo - NE Congo (atuamba belt) - Central Africa
Play / practical
egburuburu / atuamba type English
Source term: egburuburu / rhombe / bull-roarer; atuamba chain
egburuburu: the Bangba/Ngbaka name recorded for the bull-roarer at Kereboro; atuamba is the term reported for it in the region's boys' initiation context.
Etymology. An onomatopoeic name imitating the instrument's whirring roar rather than a word with independent lexical meaning; the source gives no decomposition or gloss. (medium confidence)
Three decorated wooden bull-roarers called egburuburu, collected among the Bangba and Ngbaka at Kereboro in the Haut-Uele in 1911, sit in the Tervuren collection with an unusually blunt catalogue verdict: the buzzing stick has no sacred significance and was used as a plaything by young boys. One is a slightly curved, perforated blade incised with regular horizontal and vertical line patterns and worked by pyrography, fitted with a cord; two others are a decorated curved blade tied by a cord to a separate straight wooden stick, one of them 38.5 centimetres long. All three came back with the expedition of Armand Hutereau, sent into the northeastern Congo in 1911 to enrich the Musée du Congo belge; he returned with some eight thousand objects, was drafted on the outbreak of war, and fell in battle near Saint-Georges in November 1914. Separately, a strand of musicological reference places the Bangba in a regional atuamba belt where the bull-roarer figures in boys' circumcision and initiation; the Kereboro specimens carry no such reading, and the two accounts have not been reconciled.
Ce bâtonnet vibrant n'a aucune signification sacrée et servait de jouet aux jeunes garçons.
This buzzing stick has no sacred significance and was used as a plaything by young boys.
RMCA/AfricaMuseum object record MO.0.0.8494 (Bangba/Ngbaka egburuburu, Kereboro, Haut-Uele; Hutereau mission)
- Object
- Three decorated wooden egburuburu bull-roarers from Kereboro, Haut-Uele (RMCA MO.0.0.8494, MO.0.0.8515, MO.0.0.8520).
- Function
- AfricaMuseum records identify the Kereboro examples as secular boys' playthings; separate New Grove/Laurenty atuamba material is retained only as comparative context.
- Map confidence
- low_medium - Bangba country, Uele
- Source location
- RMCA MO.0.0.8494, MO.0.0.8515, MO.0.0.8520; New Grove s.vv.
- Toy / secular survival