MUS2026-034 - museum specimen
Sotho bull-roarer (sevuruvuru)
Lesotho - South Africa - Southern Africa
Play / practical
sevuruvuru English
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 Percival Kirby's fieldwork fills the gap: the Sotho of Basutoland still made the instrument occasionally in the 1920s and called it sevuruvuru - the same word the Chwana used. Their children carried it as a protection against dogs and other animals. By then the roarer had no rite and no taboo anywhere in the region; adult use lingered only among the Bushmen, and among Bantu-speakers like the Sotho it had become a child's thing.
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, 'Bull-Roarers and Spinning-Disks', in The Musical Instruments of the Indigenous People of South Africa, 3rd ed. (2013), p. 98 — text of the 1934 first edition
- Object
- Bull-roarer of the Sotho, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (acc. 1910.13.2). Kirby records that the Sotho of Basutoland still made the instrument occasionally in his day and called it sevuruvuru - the same word, he notes, as the Chwana seburuburu.
- Function
- Carried by children as a protection against dogs and other animals (Kirby, p. 101) - the one concrete Sotho use on record. Kirby's chapter-wide finding otherwise applies: no surviving ritual, no taboo, the roarer 'for the most part... looked upon as a child's toy'.
- Map confidence
- low - approximate culture/locality centroid
- Source location
Page references
Kirby 2013 ed., p. 101 (chapter pp. 97-103); PRM acc. 1910.13.2
- Toy / secular survival