The Bullroarer Atlas

MOIYA1983-001 - ethnographic attestation

Ngbaka minagende (Gemena) vukuma

Democratic Republic of the Congo - Gemena, Sud-Ubangi (then Équateur Region) - Central Africa

Restricted

Representative—not this record’s object: a corded Central African wooden bullroarer held by the British Museum.
Representative — not this record’s object. · a corded Central African wooden bullroarer held by the British Museum. · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

Vukuma French

Vukuma: a whirled wooden plaque whose hum was identified as the voice of the ancestral spirits.

Before an Ngbaka boy reached the knife, he had to pass through life, sickness, and death. Elders beat him between two hedges; hidden men made the animal-bodied ancestor Ya lunge from behind skins; then he was circumcised on an altar of branches from the tree used to bury the dead. Ya kept crying through the novices’ seclusion—but now the ancestor’s voice came from the vukuma, a wooden plaque whirled on a cord until it gave its strange hum: “the voice of the ancestral spirits.”

C'est la voix des mânes.

It is the voice of the ancestral spirits.

Moiya, 'La circoncision chez les Ngbaka' (1983), p. 21
Object
Small wooden bullroarer with cord and stick handle; the regional Sud-Ubangi account describes an oval tablet of kúlà or gbéákùbù (Guarea laurentii) wood swung on a cord.
Function
Circumcision-camp voice of the ancestor Ya and the ancestral spirits.
Map confidence
high - Gemena city centre (PCGN 2026: 03°15′23″N, 19°46′20″E) anchors the article's study population; not a specific ceremony site.
Source location
Page references

pp. 6, 16, 21; Vukuma drawing on p. 21; Omasombo 2013, pp. 134-135

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