The Bullroarer Atlas

MOELLER1936-003 - ethnographic attestation

Warega (Lega)

Democratic Republic of the Congo - Maniema - eastern forest, Province Orientale - Central Africa

Restricted

A ribbed wooden bullroarer with its cord bound tightly around one end.
Representative — not this record’s object. · A ribbed wooden bullroarer with its cord bound tightly around one end Image source

tuamba French

Source term: Tuamba (rhombe)

tuamba: the Warega (Lega) name for the circumcision bullroarer, paired with the whistle kabili -- the same pair the Bakumu and Bamanga use as tuambi + kabili, and cognate with Bapere atuamba.

Among the Warega -- the Lega of the eastern forests, best known now for the Bwami society and its ivories -- the bullroarer sounded at circumcision was the tuamba, and it went out with a whistle called kabili and a pipe, the lokumu. The name travels. North of them the Bakumu and the Bamanga called their circumcision roarer tuambi, with the same kabili whistle beside it, and away east in the Ituri the Bapere swung an atuamba at the same rite: a single word for the instrument running from the forest down into Maniema, while the peoples between them in Moeller's own table used words with nothing in common. He never described the Lega object itself. He described the type -- an oblong plank of wood tied to the end of a string, whirled until it roared like an engine -- and said that the rest of his table named those same three instruments in other tongues. What he does record for the Lega is a second grouping with no initiation at all and no instruments: the rite was not universal even within one people. Everywhere it was kept, he wrote, the same superstitious fear attached to them.

Partout une même crainte superstitieuse leur est attachée.

Everywhere the same superstitious fear attaches to them.

Moeller 1936:552
Object
A simple oblong plank of wood fixed to the end of a string and whirled in free air. Moeller describes the type-object only under the Babali name maduali (p. 551) and states that the rest of his table is the same three instruments under other names; he never describes a Lega specimen, so material, dimensions, cord and perforation are unrecorded.
Function
Sounded at the boys' circumcision rite alongside the whistle kabili and the pipe lokumu; one of the three 'esprits de l'initiation' that initiates were forbidden to discuss with the uninitiated, in a rite whose shared features included seclusion, a ban on speaking to women, and the exclusion of women.
Map confidence
medium - Shabunda, the historic centre of Lega (Warega) country in Maniema, used as a territory-level anchor; Moeller gives no locality and the Lega range extends well north and east of it.
Source location
Page references

Moeller 1936:551-552 (table on p. 552)

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