The Bullroarer Atlas

KIRBY1934-001 - ethnographic attestation

Pedi bull-roarer (kgabududu)

South Africa - Transvaal (Sekhukhuneland, Limpopo) - Southern Africa

Play / practical

Tapering wooden blade with a painted zigzag border and bound cord.
Representative — not this record’s object. · Tapering wooden blade with a painted zigzag border and bound cord Image source

kgabududu / kgabudubudu

Source term: bull-roarer

The Pedi of the Transvaal make a bull-roarer and call it *kgabududu*, or *kgabudubudu* — a name that seats it inside a family of southern African roarer-words built on one rolling root: Korana *burubush*, Chwana *seburuburu*, Sotho *sevuruvuru*, Venda *luvuvu*, Xhosa *uvuru*. The name is all there is. Nobody measured it, drew it, or said what it was for. Across the whole region in the 1920s and 30s the instrument had no ritual and no taboo left attached to it; it belonged to children, and a thing adults hold unimportant is very hard to learn anything about.

The Pedi also make a bull-roarer, which they call kgabududu or kgabudubudu.

Kirby, Bull-Roarers and Spinning-Disks, p. 101
Object
Bull-roarer; not described. The name is the whole of the Pedi record.
Function
No Pedi-specific use recorded. Across southern Africa in the 1920s-30s the instrument carried no ritual and no taboo and was largely a child's toy.
Source
Percival R. Kirby, 'Bull-Roarers and Spinning-Disks', ch. 4 of The Musical Instruments of the Indigenous People of South Africa, 3rd revised ed. (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2013), pp. 97-103 — the text of the 1st ed., The Musical Instruments of the Native Races of South Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1934). EDITION WARNING: the 2013…
Source location
Kirby 2013 ed., p. 101
Source confidence
low Pedi heartland (Sekhukhuneland, Limpopo) centroid; Kirby names no collection locality for the Pedi instrument.

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