FRAZER1913-018 - ethnographic attestation
Boloki
Democratic Republic of the Congo - Upper Congo - Central Africa
Play / practical
Source term: bull-roarer
Among the Boloki of the Upper Congo, the bullroarer was a boys' toy, but their elders disliked seeing it whirled, and gave a single reason: "You are calling the leopards." The spun bamboo slat made a sound like the growling of a leopard, and so the old men warned the lads off. The missionary John H. Weeks, who went to the Congo in 1881 and spent thirty years there, fifteen of them among the Boloki, recorded the toy in his chapter on native games, in a country he called "practically a toyless" one; he also gave evidence to the 1904 commission of inquiry into the abuses of Leopold's Congo Free State. Frazer cited the case in The Golden Bough, where he too noted that the sound resembled a leopard's growl and would draw the beasts. The object itself was no more than a piece of bamboo a boy could make.
_Bull-roarers_ are known and made; but the elders do not like the lads to play with them, and give as their reason: “You are calling the leopards.” This is because the whirl of the bamboo makes a sound like the growling of a leopard.
Weeks, Among Congo Cannibals (1913), p. 157
- Object
- Frazer notes that among the Boloki the bullroarer is a child's toy but elders still credit it with magical danger because the sound may attract leopards.
- Function
- Children's toy with magical/leopard-attracting taboo or danger.
- Map confidence
- medium - broad Upper Congo/Boloki-region anchor; Weeks gives Boloki ethnographic context but not a precise play locality
- Source location
- Weeks 1913, p. 157; Frazer 1913 Balder p. 229 n. 2 and p. 232 n. 3 preserve the earlier leads.
- Toy / secular survival