Kundu roarer held as a power object

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 Kundu of the Meme country, sealed their men into secret societies — dio-male, nganya, difoni — alongside a women's order, molaba, that held village law. Talbot, writing of the same people in 1926, knew the roarer as Eboku: used by many of the associations and feared most by those shut out of them, who took its booming for the very voice of the juju.

Particulars

Object

Bromhout / bull-roarer of the Kundu, Wereldmuseum / NMVW RV-1393-308; catalogued as bromhout / krachtobject.

Function

Served the men's secret associations of the Kundu, who called it Eboku; outsiders who heard it took the sound for the voice of the juju.