MUS2026-059 - museum specimen
Kuba
Democratic Republic of the Congo - Kasai (Kuba) - Central Africa
Function not recorded
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.
A Kuba bull-roarer collected on Emil Torday's Kasai expedition of 1907-09 and given to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1910. The museum logged its local name as koinambula but recorded nothing of its use. That name is a snag: Torday and Joyce, and later the musicologist Bertil Soderberg, document koy na bula, "the leopard of the village," as the Kuba and Pende name for the friction drum whose growl imitates a leopard and which sounded at Bushong initiation - an instrument distinct from the bull-roarer. Whatever this specimen's own role, the bull-roarer of the Kasai is described in the regional ethnography as, by the twentieth century, a children's plaything rather than a restricted cult voice.
- Object
- Bull-roarer of the Kuba, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (acc. 1910.1.185).
- Function
- Not recorded.
- Map confidence
- medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
- Source location
- Torday & Joyce 1910, pp. 87, 250; Soderberg 1956, p. 148