Patamaso’s iron from the termite mound

Dwo

Source term: rhombe

Dwo: the Bobo god who mediates between people and the creator Wuro; the rhombe is his personification. Patamaso Dwo: one of Dwo’s named figures, revealed at Patamaso. rhombe: French for bullroarer.

An ancestor of Patamaso was digging out termites when his hoe struck iron: a rhombe, shining as if it had just left the forge. He left it at the foot of a tree and set off with his father to a diviner, but was seized by possession on the way. A dog, chickens and millet beer were offered on the blade, and still the possession held. So the diviner ruled that every family must give a dog, the finder’s family two, and that a house be built under the tree for the rhombe, which only his family might honour. Later the possessed man came back from the bush leading three strange masks with heads of black iron. So began Patamaso Dwo, one of the oldest Bobo cults of the god Dwo, whose rhombe is his very person. In 1965 its master, Soro Sanu, kept three rhombes and the iron heads at home, carrying them into the temple under the tree, where no one else may enter, only for sacrifices.

C’était un rhombe, tout brillant comme s’il sortait de la forge.

It was a bullroarer, gleaming as if it had just come out of the forge.

Guy Le Moal, Les Bobo (1980), p. 286

Particulars

Object

An iron rhombe, a short shouldered blade pointed at one end and pierced at the other; three are kept with the cult’s iron mask heads.

Function

Sacred body of Patamaso Dwo, revealed in a termite mound with masks of iron; kept by the master of the cult and carried to the temple under the tree, which only he may enter, for sacrifices.