The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-021 - museum specimen

Ovimbundu

Elende, central Angola - Southern Africa

Play / practical

A slender wooden board with a cord looped through one end — an Ejagham piece held by the Pitt Rivers Museum, shown for the general African...
Representative image. A slender wooden board with a cord looped through one end — an Ejagham piece held by the Pitt Rivers Museum, shown for the general African form; not the Ovimbundu bull-roarer from Elende, central Angola, documented here. Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (1914.26.116) Image source

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
Object
Bull-roarer of the Ovimbundu, in the collection of Field Museum (FM Anthropology 208743).
Function
Ovimbundu bull-roarer used as a children's plaything; Hambly says that among the Ovimbundu it is used only as a toy.
Map confidence
medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
FM Anthropology 208743; Hambly 1934 p. 221 and p. 332

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