MUS2026-034 - museum specimen
Sotho
Lesotho - South Africa - Southern Africa
Play / practical
Source term: bull-roarer
A Sotho bull-roarer from the Orange Free State, collected before 1910 and given to the Pitt Rivers Museum. Its own record stops at the people and the object, but the standard fieldwork survey of Southern African instruments fills the gap: Percival Kirby found the whizzing-stick "all over South Africa" with, by his day, no surviving rituals and no taboos around it -- for the most part "looked upon as a child's toy." Adult use lingered, he noted, only among the Bushmen; among Bantu-speakers like the Sotho the roarer had become a plaything.
The bull-roarer, or whizzing-stick, is found all over South Africa. There are to-day, so far as I can discover, no rituals in which the instrument is used, and no taboos regarding its employment. For the most part it is nowadays looked upon as a child's toy.
Percival R. Kirby, The Musical Instruments of the Native Races of South Africa (1934), ch. 4, pp. 98-99
- Object
- Bull-roarer of the Sotho, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (acc. 1910.13.2).
- Function
- A child's toy: Kirby's survey found the whizzing-stick all over South Africa with no surviving ritual or taboo — "for the most part... looked upon as a child's toy," adult use lingering only among the San (Kirby 1934).
- Map confidence
- low - approximate culture/locality centroid
- Source location
- Kirby 1934, pp. 98-103; PRM acc. 1910.13.2
- Toy / secular survival