KIRBY1934-002 - ethnographic attestation
Venda (Vhavenda)
South Africa - Venda (Vhembe, northern Limpopo) - Southern
Play / practical
tshivhilivhi / luvuva (index: luvuvu) English
Source term: bull-roarer
Venda children make the bull-roarer in both of its southern African forms: the slat swung on a cord from a handle, and the disk spun on a doubled string that twists and untwists. Both go by *tshivhilivhi* or *luvuva*, and both, in the specimens collected, were particularly crudely made. That is the whole of the record. By the 1930s the instrument carried no ritual and no taboo anywhere in the region — it had passed into the hands of children, and no adult thought it worth explaining.
Venda children also make bull-roarers, called tshivhilivhi or luvuva, and of both varieties; but these instruments are particularly crude.
Kirby, Bull-Roarers and Spinning-Disks, p. 101
- Object
- Made by children in both classes: a swung slat with a handle, and a twisted spinning-disk. The Venda specimens are described as particularly crude; no dimensions recorded.
- Function
- A children's instrument. Kirby records no Venda ritual, ceremony or taboo, consistent with his chapter-wide finding for southern Africa.
- Map confidence
- low - Venda (Vhembe district, northern Limpopo) centroid; Kirby names no collection locality.
- Source location
Page references
Kirby 2013 ed., p. 101; figs. 4.2 nos. 1, 4 (bull-roarers) and 4.3 no. 4 (spinning-disk)
- Toy / secular survival