The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-072 - museum specimen

Kundu

Cameroon - Africa

Function not recorded

A narrow flat wooden blade with cord bound near its squared end — a Yoruba bull-roarer held by the Pitt Rivers Museum, shown for the general...
Representative image. A narrow flat wooden blade with cord bound near its squared end — a Yoruba bull-roarer held by the Pitt Rivers Museum, shown for the general African form; not the Kundu bromhout, catalogued by the Wereldmuseum as a power object, documented here. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 1930.43.93) Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

bromhout = Dutch for "buzz-wood," the NMVW catalog term for a bullroarer; krachtobject = "power object."

Whirled hard on its cord, this hardwood slat roars — that low, carrying buzz is the whole of what it does, and a German collector carried it out of the Cameroon forest before 1903, catalogued only as a "power object." Its makers, the Bakundu of the Meme country, sealed their men into secret societies — dio-male, nganya, difoni — alongside a women's order, molaba, that held village law. Which of them swung this roarer, and who was barred from hearing it, no record now tells.

Bromhout

Wereldmuseum / NMVW RV-1393-308
Object
Bromhout / bull-roarer of the Kundu, Wereldmuseum / NMVW RV-1393-308; catalogued as bromhout / krachtobject.
Function
Not recorded.
Map confidence
medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
RV-1393-308

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