HOBLEY1922-001 - ethnographic attestation
Kikuyu kiburuti child-toy survival
Central Kenya - Southern Kikuyu - East Africa
Play / practical
kiburuti English
Source term: bull-roarer
kiburuti — the Kikuyu name for the bull-roarer, recorded by Hobley as surviving locally only as a child's toy.
When the colonial official C. W. Hobley asked whether the bull-roarer figured in Kikuyu circumcision rites, he found the instrument, well known locally as the kiburuti, surviving only as a child's toy. Among many of the neighbouring tribes, he noted, the bull-roarer and “its first cousin, the friction drum,” were still regularly sounded in initiation ceremonial; in Southern Kikuyu, where the old circumcision ceremonial was by then rapidly dying out, the whirling toy was kept going by children. One such kiburuti, collected in just those decades by the missionary Marion Scott Stevenson, survives in Glasgow with its whirling rig intact — the small blade still tied by its cord to the pole, 'Bull-roarer from Kenya Colony' inked across the wood.
Inquiries were made as to whether the bull-roarer, which is well known in Kikuyu as kiburuti, was used in these ceremonies, but curiously enough it appears to survive only as a child’s toy, whereas in many of the neighbouring tribes it and its first cousin, the friction drum, are regularly used in initiation ceremonial.
Hobley 1922, Bantu Beliefs and Magic, p. 87
- Object
- Hobley records the bull-roarer as well known in Kikuyu under the name kiburuti, but says it appears to survive there only as a child's toy.
- Function
- In a circumcision-context discussion, Hobley says the Kikuyu kiburuti is known locally but seems to survive as a child toy, contrasting it with unnamed neighboring tribes where bullroarers and friction drums are used in initiation ceremonial.
- Map confidence
- medium - representative coordinate for named people/region; source does not warrant a precise ritual locality
- Source location
- p. 87
- Initiation rite
- Toy / secular survival