The Bullroarer Atlas

No. MUS2026-021

Embungumbungu, a children's plaything

Elende, central Angola · Southern Africa

Play / practical

Long orange-brown wooden bullroarer collected in Angola in 1937, with a pointed blade, cord at one end and several fibre strips wrapped around its middle.
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. Angolan bullroarer with attached cord. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Image source

embungumbungu

Source term: bull-roarer

Swung on its cord, the bull-roarer makes the droning roar that across much of the world is a spirit's voice — sounded in secret men's rites, hidden from women on pain of death. Among the Ovimbundu of Angola's central highlands it carries none of that weight. When Wilfrid Hambly collected at Elende in the early 1930s, he found the instrument only in the hands of children, a plaything and nothing more; the sacred voice heard elsewhere is here, he notes plainly, used only as a toy.

among the Ovimbundu the instrument is used only as a toy

Hambly, The Ovimbundu of Angola (1934), p. 332

Particulars

Object
Bull-roarer of the Ovimbundu, in the collection of Field Museum (FM Anthropology 208743).

Sources

  1. Field Museum, Anthropology object 208743 View · archived
  2. Hambly, The Ovimbundu of Angola (1934), pp. 221, 332

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.