The Bullroarer Atlas

No. HARDING1973-005

Brandberg rock-painting bullroarer depiction

Namibia · Brandberg · Damaraland · Southern Africa

Sacred / spirit

Archaeological datec. 4,000–2,000 years agoRegional tradition; motif undated.
The Brandberg running figure with its dangling implement, redrawn on the 1973–74 cover of African Music.
Plate I. The Brandberg running figure with its dangling implement, redrawn on the 1973–74 cover of African Music. Image source
Cover of African Music, volume 5, number 3 (1973/4), with the red journal title above a black line drawing of a running figure.
Plate II. The cover of African Music 5(3) (1973/4). Image source

Source term: depicted bull-roarer

In a frieze painted above and to the right of the famous "White Lady" of the Brandberg massif in western Namibia, a running, white-painted figure carries a bull-roarer in its hand. Abbé Henri Breuil, who copied the panels in the 1950s, called this figure the "Baboon-man" for the tail and snout that he judged were late additions to an originally human body. J. R. Harding, surveying the instrument's history in 1973, pointed to a second bull-roarer Breuil had found on a boulder some distance from the White Lady, carried by one of three men walking in single file, each wearing a helmet crowned by an enormous ostrich plume. Harding read the "dressed-up" character of both groups as a sign that the instrument was being used ceremonially, and set the Baboon-man beside Stow's account of the southern San "Baboon dance," in which dancers costumed themselves as the animal.

Particulars

Object
A bull-roarer painted in the hand of a running figure, with a second on a nearby boulder.

Sources

  1. Harding, 'The Bull-roarer in History and in Antiquity,' African Music 5(3) (1973): 40-42, p. 41 and cover illustration View · archived
  2. Breuil (1955), cited in Harding (1973)
  3. Harding (1968), cited in Harding (1973)

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.