MUS2026-059 - museum specimen
Kuba bull-roarer (Pitt Rivers)
Democratic Republic of the Congo - Kasai (Kuba) - Central Africa
Restricted
KOINAMBULA English
Source term: bull-roarer
koy na bula: Kuba and Pende for "leopard of the village," a name documented for the friction drum, not the bullroarer. Nkanda: the Bushongo initiation society and its law, under the High Priest Nyenge; Mete Nkanda names the third ordeal of the cycle, and Kananyenge the elder who presides (Torday 1925 pp. 185, 187, 190).
The Bushongo say they invented the bull-roarer. A young man brought palm-wine home each day for himself and his mother and left none for his father; the old man followed him into the wood, and as the boy gathered his brimming calabashes, a thin strip of wood on a string began to howl above his hidden father's head. Night after night the 'awful ghost' waylaid him until the son begged forgiveness — and the old men, let in on the trick, took the roarer for their own: since that day, the royal historian told Emil Torday, it has sounded at initiation to frighten the boys and teach them to respect their elders. At the puberty seclusion the elders still circled the boys' camp by night, whirring out the howls of wild beasts. This specimen came back with Torday himself from the Kasai.
At night the elders go near the camp and make weird noises with the bull-roarer, which imitates very closely the howling of wild beasts.
Emil Torday, On the Trail of the Bushongo (1925), p. 187
- Object
- Bull-roarer of the Kuba, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (acc. 1910.1.185).
- Function
- Torday, the collector, records the Bushongo bull-roarer as an initiation instrument: whirled at night around the boys' seclusion camp to imitate the howling of wild beasts and frighten the novices, with an origin story presenting it as the elders' invented ghost.
- Map confidence
- medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
- Source location
Page references
Torday & Joyce 1910, pp. 87, 250; Soderberg 1956, p. 148; Torday 1925 pp. 87-88, 185, 187, 190
- Spirit voice
- Initiation rite