Bassari akotikoti

akotikoti

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. Viviana Pâques, writing of the Tenda peoples to whom the Bassari belong, records a religion organised inside the totemic clan with an initiation in which the rhombe plays an important part. The masks and flutes of the Bassari initiation cycle carry its spirit voices; the akotikoti had its own place in the same rite.

Instrument de musique.

Musical instrument.

Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, inv. 71.1988.29.25

Particulars

Object

Bassari rhombe from Etyolo, local name akotikoti (Quai Branly 71.1988.29.25).