The Bullroarer Atlas

GOLDSCHMIDT1976-001 - ethnographic attestation

Sebei lion, seized in the dark

Uganda - Mount Elgon, northern escarpment (Kapchorwa - Kween - Bukwo) - East Africa

Restricted

A Nandi bull-roarer; the Nandi, Sebei kin, also call it 'lion'.
Representative — not this record’s object. · A Nandi bull-roarer; the Nandi, Sebei kin, also call it 'lion'. · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

Source term: bull-roarer; "lion"

'lion': the Sebei name for the bull-roarer revealed at the boys' coming-out; the girls' counterpart is the 'leopard' (melilo).

All through their seclusion the newly circumcised Sebei boys heard the lion roaring. At the secret night rite that opened their coming-out, they were taken into the bush, away from the houses, to meet it. While older men whirled the bull-roarer, sponsors hid in the dark with a lion made of monkey skin; each boy, alone, had to take hold of the beast and was scratched with bent thorns for trying. Only then was he shown the roaring board, and made to twirl it himself until he was worn out. If the blade flew off its string, disaster would follow. The girls, shut in a closed house, met a leopard instead.

The lion is a bull-roarer, which makes the sound the initiates have heard in the past, but the source of which they did not know.

Goldschmidt, Culture and Behavior of the Sebei (1976), p. 291
Object
A flat, blade-like board on a cord that roars when twirled.
Function
The roar of the 'lion' that newly circumcised boys hear throughout seclusion, made by older men whirling the bull-roarer. At the secret night rite that opens the coming-out, held in the bush away from the houses, each boy is led alone to face the lion, is scratched with bent thorns when he takes hold of it, and is then shown the bull-roarer and made to twirl it until exhausted.
Source
Walter Goldschmidt with Gale Goldschmidt, Culture and Behavior of the Sebei: A Study in Continuity and Adaptation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 290-291; Walter Goldschmidt, The Sebei: A Study in Adaptation (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1986), initiation chapter, 'Hazing'; Jan Jacob de Wolf, 'Circumcision and Initiation in…
Source location
Page references

Goldschmidt 1976:290-291; de Wolf 1983:386; Goldschmidt 1986 and 1990 pages unpinned

Source confidence
high
Location note
Kapchorwa, the Sebei administrative centre on the north Mount Elgon escarpment and the centre of Goldschmidt's field area; the sources name no single rite site.

Regions: Africa

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