The Bullroarer Atlas

GUNNCONANT1960-001 - ethnographic attestation

Achipawa okiso voice, seen only by the Magaji

Nigeria - Kontagora Division, Niger Province (now Mariga LGA, Niger State) - West Africa

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The 1926 okiso festival at Kumbashi: thatch-cloaked spirits and a roarer only the Magaji saw.
The 1926 okiso festival at Kumbashi: thatch-cloaked spirits and a roarer only the Magaji saw. Image source

Kabara

Source term: bull-roarer

okiso: the intermediary ancestral spirits; in the circumcising villages the bull-roarer is their voice. Kabara: Hausa "elder", the title of a chief's adviser and, in some villages, the name of the wooden bull-roarer itself rather than its sound. Magaji: the clan head who conducts okiso ritual. Kungwa: the supreme being, "father of all okiso".

Achipawa villages were divided by whether their spirits spoke. In some the okiso, the ancestral spirits, were silent and boys went uncircumcised; in others the okiso had a voice and circumcision was the rule, and at Kumbashi that voice was a bull-roarer. In March 1926 an outsider watched Kumbashi's festival from the distance a stranger was allowed. After a day's hunt three spirits came at dusk, cloaked in thatch and about seven feet high, so awkward they had to be guided up to the secluded hilltop. Feasting and singing went on there for four days while the roarer sounded, and none but the Magaji, the clan head, might see it. No woman had anything to do with okiso.

Afterwards, feasting, drinking, and singing continued on the hilltop for four days; the bull-roarer was used, though at Kumbashi none but the Magaji was permitted to see it.

Gunn and Conant 1960:62
Object
Wooden bull-roarer; no dimensions recorded.
Function
The voice of the okiso ancestral spirits in the circumcising villages. At Kumbashi it sounded through the four days of the annual okiso festival on the sacred hill, and none but the clan head (Magaji) might see it.
Source
Harold D. Gunn and F. P. Conant, Peoples of the Middle Niger Region, Northern Nigeria, Ethnographic Survey of Africa, Western Africa Part XV (London: International African Institute, 1960), pp. 59-63 and n. 12, after Mathews 1926
Source location
Page references

pp. 59, 61-63; n. 12

Source confidence
medium to high
Location note
Kumbashi village, Mariga LGA, Niger State (OSM/Nominatim), where the 1926 okiso festival was witnessed.

Regions: Africa · West Africa

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