KIRBY1934-002 - ethnographic attestation
Venda bull-roarer and spinning-disk (tshivhilivhi / luvuva)
South Africa - Venda (Vhembe, northern Limpopo) - Southern Africa
Play / practical
tshivhilivhi / luvuva (index: luvuvu)
Source term: bull-roarer
Venda children make both of the southern African whirring instruments: the slat swung on a cord from a handle, and the disk spun on a doubled string that twists and untwists. One word covers both. Kirby heard *luvuva* for each of them, and *tshivhilivhi* as a second name for the swung slat alone — which makes Venda the place where the widespread *-vuru/-vuvu* root refuses to settle on one instrument. Among the Xhosa the same root, *uvuru*, names the disk and nothing else. The specimens Kirby collected here were crudely made, children's work rather than a craftsman's, and he says nothing about what either one was for.
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.
- 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
Page references
Kirby 2013 ed., p. 101; figs. 4.2 nos. 1, 4 (bull-roarers) and 4.3 no. 4 (spinning-disk)
- Source confidence
- low Venda (Vhembe district, northern Limpopo) centroid; Kirby names no collection locality.
- Toy / secular survival