MEEK1931-001 - ethnographic attestation
Kurama / Akurmi
Zaria Province, Northern Nigeria (now Lere LGA, Kaduna State) - West Africa
Sacred / spirit
makili English
Source term: bull-roarer
makili — Kurama (T'kurmi) name for the bull-roarer, per Meek 1931 II:175. Not attested in any independent Kurama lexicon consulted, and not a Hausa word.
The Kurama call themselves Akurmi, the Forest People; in the 1920s some eleven or twelve thousand of them lived in the hills northwest of the Katab. They dealt with their dead at the graves themselves, and in those rites the bull-roarer — *makili* — played a prominent part. The rules of the place were exact. A younger brother would not approach an ancestral grave unless an elder brother came with him; ashes were thrown over the right shoulder and over the left. Women never went to the graves at all — yet men made their offerings at the graves of female ancestors as readily as at those of male ones, so the dead were honoured across a line the living could not cross.
the bull roarer (makili) plays a prominent part. Noteworthy points are that, although women never resort to the ancestral graves, men perform their rites at the graves of female ancestors as well as of male.
Meek 1931, Tribal Studies in Northern Nigeria, II:175
- Object
- Bull-roarer named makili in the Kurama language; Meek describes no dimensions, material or form.
- Function
- Sounded in the ancestor cult, in rites performed at the ancestral graves themselves, where Meek says it "plays a prominent part". No agent is named and no rule about the instrument is stated.
- Map confidence
- medium - Saminaka, Lere LGA, Kaduna State — the headquarters town of the Akurmi (Kurama) chiefdom, whose paramount ruler is the B'gwam Akurmi. Territory anchor for the named people; not a use site.
- Source location
- vol. II p. 175
- Death and rebirth