The Bullroarer Atlas

EXH2026-042 - secondary catalog

Mayogo

Democratic Republic of the Congo - NE Congo (atuamba belt) - Central Africa

Function not recorded

A ribbed wooden bull-roarer with its cord bound tightly around one end, catalogued as an Arab rather than Mayogo piece — shown for the general...
Representative image. A ribbed wooden bull-roarer with its cord bound tightly around one end, catalogued as an Arab rather than Mayogo piece — shown for the general Central African form; the Mayogo's own mbirimbiri is unphotographed. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 1913.17.73) Image source

(atuamba type) English

Source term: bullroarer (New Grove cross-entry)

mbirimbiri: the recorded Mayogo (and Bangba) name for the bullroarer.

Etymology. An onomatopoeic name: the reduplicated word imitates the instrument's whirring, roaring sound. The Bangba use mbirimbiri too. The source offers no word-for-word decomposition. (medium confidence)

Say it aloud and you hear the thing itself: mbirimbiri, a reduplicated whirr of a word that the Mayogo and their Bangba neighbours, forest people of the northeastern Congo's Uele country, gave to the spun blade of wood whose drone it imitates. The name is what came down to us. Collectors carried off the sound-word but not the scene around it: who swung the roarer, whose ears it was meant for, and what its voice was made to summon among the Mayogo went unrecorded.

mbirimbiri

New Grove / Grove bullroarer term or cross-entry, local audit locator in page_or_plate
Object
Bullroarer; recorded Mayogo name mbirimbiri.
Function
Source-checked bullroarer term/cross-entry for the Mayogo; wider regional ritual context is not row-specific in the recovered evidence.
Map confidence
low_medium - Mayogo country, Uele
Source location
New Grove / Grove, Mayogo entry (term mbirimbiri)

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