The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-097 - museum specimen

Bedik

Senegal - Africa

Restricted

A smooth, reddish-brown oval board with a faint carved centerline and a cord threaded through a hole at one end — an African bull-roarer held...
Representative image. A smooth, reddish-brown oval board with a faint carved centerline and a cord threaded through a hole at one end — an African bull-roarer held by the British Museum, shown for the general form; not the Bedik rhombe of Senegal documented here. © The Trustees of the British Museum (E/Af1908-0723-86) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

Sounded out of sight, the bull-roarer is one of the hidden voices of the Mystere, the men's secret cult of the Bedik, whose hill villages cling to the slopes above Bandafassi in eastern Senegal. Masks woven fresh from bush plants each year, and the whir of instruments like this one, lend the forest spirits a body and a voice; their meaning passes only among initiated men, never to women or the uninitiated. Boys earn entry through the Manindam, a month spent running a fixed circuit through the village before long months alone in the sacred forest.

Tenus à l'écart des dessous de ces mises en scène rituelles, les femmes et les non-initiés doivent ignorer jusqu'à un certain point la nature des procédés en cause.

Kept apart from the workings of these ritual stagings, women and the uninitiated must remain, to a degree, ignorant of the procedures involved.

Pierre Smith, “Le « Mystère » et ses masques chez les Bedik”, L'Homme 24 (1984), p. 5
Object
Quai Branly object 71.1971.80.74: Bedik rhombe.
Function
Quai Branly API identifies a Bedik rhombe as a musical instrument; it gives no female-spirit or women-indoors passage.
Map confidence
high - approximate Bedik (Bandafassi/Iwol) territory, SE Senegal
Source location
object record 239913 (Quai Branly API)

View source Open this point on the interactive map