EXH2026-050 - secondary catalog
Korana (burubush)
South Africa - Middle Orange River (!Kora country) - Southern Africa
Play / practical
burubush English
Source term: burubush (bull-roarer)
burubush — Korana (!Kora Khoekhoe) name for the bull-roarer.
Among the Korana, the Khoekhoe pastoralists of the middle Orange River, the bull-roarer was called burubush. The name comes down through Percival Kirby, the ethnomusicologist who crossed thousands of miles of the country in an ageing Model T between 1923 and 1933 and gave a chapter of his 1934 study to the bull-roarers and spinning-disks of its peoples. By the time he wrote, the instrument had lost whatever cult it once held: he could find no ritual in which it was used and no taboo on its handling, and across the region it had become, in his words, mostly a child's toy. Only among the Bushmen, who still whirled it to gather swarming bees, did he meet it in adult hands. For the Korana it survives as a name and a plaything, its older meaning, if it had one, long gone silent.
There are to-day, so far as I can discover, no rituals in which the instrument is used, and no taboos regarding its employment... For the most part it is nowadays looked upon as a child's toy.
P. R. Kirby, The Musical Instruments of the Indigenous People of South Africa, "Bull-Roarers and Spinning-Disks" (ch. 4), p. 98 (text of 1934 ed.)
- Object
- Bull-roarer, very crudely made, and unusual in that the cord is NOT attached to a handle - the swinger holds the cord itself (Kirby fig. 4.2 no. 7). Kirby photographed the Korana boy who owned it with the instrument in hand (fig. 4.4).
- Function
- A boy's instrument. Kirby saw it in use by a Korana boy at Bloemhof and records no Korana ceremony, taboo or rainmaking; southern African bull-roarers had by his day no ritual and no taboo left, and were 'for the most part... looked upon as a child's toy'. The Korana name is burubush (Buchner).
- Map confidence
- medium_high - middle Orange River, Korana country
- Source location
Page references
Kirby 2013 ed., p. 100; fig. 4.2 no. 7 and fig. 4.4 (photograph of the Korana boy); cf. Kirby, Bantu Studies vi(2) (1932), p. 195
- Toy / secular survival