The Bullroarer Atlas

GUENTHER1986-001 - ethnographic attestation

Naro (Nharo) San, Ghanzi District

Botswana - Ghanzi farm block, Ghanzi District (Bechuanaland Protectorate at the time of the earlier reports) - Southern Africa

Restricted

a San Schwirrholz from Oas with its cord and winding stick.
Representative — not this record’s object. · a San Schwirrholz from Oas with its cord and winding stick · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

Hisi English

Hisi: the Naro name for the bullroarer, recorded from Guenther's 1986 Nharo ethnography.

Naro boys came out of initiation having met a god who was never there. The old men waited until dark, whirled a bullroarer somewhere out in the veld, and let the sound stand for //Gauwa — the trickster who works the bush, the counterpart of Hise the sky-maker — or for Hise himself. Then they walked the boys out to a small grass hut, built in secret by one of the elders days before, and told them it was //Gauwa's house. The instrument supplied the voice and the hut supplied the address: between them the initiands were given a god with a body, a residence and a reason to keep quiet about the men who had made both. Among the Naro that trickster could show up in female guise, which is not the way the roarer's owners usually tell it.

the encounter with //Gauwa or Hise, whose presence the old (Nharo) men might simulate by whirring a bull roarer at night and leading the boys to a small grass hut one of the old men had secretly built out in the veld, and claiming that it was //Gauwa's house

Guenther, 'Tricksters and Trancers' (1999), citing Lebzelter 1934: 70 and Guenther 1986a: 277
Object
Whirled bullroarer; no dimensions, material or hole placement are given in either source. Kumbani et al. classify the Naro hisi as a bullroarer as against the spinning disks of the same region.
Function
Sounded at night by the old men during male initiation to simulate the presence of the trickster-god //Gauwa (or the sky-creator Hise) for the initiands.
Map confidence
medium - Ghanzi town centre anchors the Ghanzi farm block where Guenther worked among the Naro; not a ceremony site.
Source location
Page references

Guenther 1986, p. 277 (via Guenther 1999 and Kumbani et al. 2019 Table 2); Lebzelter 1934, p. 70

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