The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-098 - museum specimen

Koma

Alantika Mountains - North Cameroon - Central Africa

Restricted

A pale wooden plank with cord coiled tightly through a hole near its blunt, cracked end, the other end tapering to a sharp point — an African...
Representative image. A pale wooden plank with cord coiled tightly through a hole near its blunt, cracked end, the other end tapering to a sharp point — an African bull-roarer held by the British Museum, shown for the general form; not the Koma instrument of Cameroon documented here. © The Trustees of the British Museum (E/Af1952-07-142) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

Among the Koma of the Alantika Mountains, on the Cameroon–Nigeria border, the bull-roarer is forged from iron — a flattened isosceles triangle with rounded corners, pierced through the middle and whirled on a cord. It belongs to a class of sacred instruments from which the uninitiated are kept apart: unlike the drums and pipes played openly at gatherings, these hidden instruments carry a protective power released only by the officiants of the cult. In the ethnographer Edmond Dounias's account, the roaring of the rhombe is the transposed voice of the ancestors, who hold malevolent spirits at a distance so that a rite may proceed undisturbed; when it sounds, the uninitiated are ordered to stay indoors. Every rhombe the Koma make is of iron; the specimen recorded here, an iron blade about sixteen centimetres long, is held by the musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac.

Le vrombissement des rhombes est une transposition des voix des ancêtres qui maintiennent à distance les esprits maléfiques susceptibles de troubler le bon déroulement d'une cérémonie rituelle. Tous les rhombes confectionnés par les Koma sont en fer.

The whirring of the bull-roarers is a transposition of the voices of the ancestors, who keep at a distance the malevolent spirits liable to disturb the proper course of a ritual ceremony. All the bull-roarers made by the Koma are of iron.

Dounias 1998, "L'élevage du taurin chez les Koma gí̵mbē (Nord-Cameroun)," in Des taurins et des hommes (ORSTOM/IRD), n. 9
Object
Iron bullroarer of the Koma: a flattened isosceles triangle with rounded corners, center-pierced and spun on a cord.
Function
Hidden cult instrument whose roar transposes ancestral voices, keeps malevolent spirits away, and signals that spirits will speak; non-initiates must stay indoors.
Map confidence
medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
Dounias 1994, p. 202 n. 9 and p. 208 n. 12; Quai Branly object 241891

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