The Night Cow of Birifu

tinsoo naab

"the Night Cow" (Goody's own translation)

Something moved through the Birifu night making a noise, and the noise was a cow — the Night Cow, tinsoo naab, which had a small cult of its own among the LoDagaa of northwest Ghana. To be let into it was to learn one thing: that the cow is really a bull-roarer. The monster was a board on a string. The cult bore on health and well-being, and fowls were killed in it, and it kept a closed door — those outside it, the not-yet-initiated and those forbidden ever to join, were called dakume, the same word the great Bagre society used for its own excluded. By Jack Goody's time at Birifu the adults did not take the Night Cow seriously. It looked to him like an association on the way out: a monster in the last stage of becoming a rumour.

Particulars

Object

Not described; named only as a bull-roarer.

Function

The instrument of a minor Birifu cult called the Night Cow, whose initiatory content is the discovery that the cow is really a bull-roarer. Bears on health and well-being; involves the killing of fowls; non-initiates (dakume) include those forbidden to join. Goody judged the association moribund by his fieldwork.