MUS2026-089 - museum specimen
Bassari
Senegal - Etyolo, Kedougou - Africa
Function not recorded
akotikoti French
Source term: bull-roarer
akotikoti is the Bassari vernacular name recorded for the rhombe (bull-roarer); the museum classifies it generically as "rhombe" / "Instrument de musique."
A Bassari bull-roarer, locally called akotikoti, collected at Etyolo in eastern Senegal by the ethnographer Monique Gessain and published in the 1976 Musée de l'Homme catalogue of Bassari collections. It is a slender blade of Pterocarpus erinaceus wood, about 24 centimetres long, swung on a cotton cord. The record names it only as a musical instrument and records no use, secret, or restriction. Bassari ritual voice belongs to the masks and flutes of the initiation cycle, not to this whirled blade, and no source documents a ceremonial role for the akotikoti itself.
Instrument de musique.
Musical instrument.
Quai Branly API object 274651
- Object
- Quai Branly object 71.1988.29.25: Bassari rhombe, local name akotikoti, from Etyolo.
- Function
- Quai Branly API identifies a Bassari rhombe named akotikoti from Etyolo as a musical instrument; no use or gender language is recorded.
- Map confidence
- high - approximate Bassari (Salémata) territory, SE Senegal
- Source location
- Lestrange & Gessain 1976, pp. 244-258 (per Quai Branly object record 274651, inv. 71.1988.29.25)