MACKENZIE1925-001 - ethnographic attestation
Konde (Nyakyusa-Ngonde), Malawi-Tanzania borderlands
Konde country, north end of Lake Malawi - East Africa
Play / practical
ifula English
Among the Konde at the head of Lake Malawi the bull-roarer is named for what it once commanded: ifula — rain. By the 1920s it had slipped into the hands of children, and the old people held both truths at once: the whirling blade stops the rain, they said, and yet no well-disposed spirit takes any notice of child's play. A weather instrument remembered by its name, retired into a toy.
Ifula, rain, is our bull-roarer; old people still believe that it stops the rain; but even they admit that no well-disposed spirit takes any notice of child's play.
MacKenzie, The Spirit-Ridden Konde (1925), p. 53
- Function
- Children's toy named 'rain': old people still believe it stops the rain, while admitting that no well-disposed spirit takes any notice of child's play.
- Map confidence
- low_medium - Karonga lakeshore anchor for Konde country.
- Source location
- MacKenzie 1925, p. 53
- Weather / fertility magic
- Toy / secular survival