The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-099 - museum specimen

Bamba

Gabon - Okondja, Haut-Ogooue - Africa

Play / practical

A long, thin flat board, split part-way along from its blunt end, a single long cord knotted through the hole at the other — an African...
Representative image. A long, thin flat board, split part-way along from its blunt end, a single long cord knotted through the hole at the other — an African bull-roarer held by the British Museum, shown for the general form; not the Bamba rhombe from Okondja documented here. © The Trustees of the British Museum (E/Af1954-23-3752) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

Swung on a cord, this poker-worked slat of wood — long as a forearm, barely thirty grams — hummed and whirred in a child's hands in the forest towns around Okondja. When it left eastern Gabon before 1935, its collector wrote only two words beside it: jouet d'enfant, a child's toy. No spirit-voice, no secret, no ban follows it in the record — among the Bamba this bullroarer was simply a plaything that sang.

Jouet d'enfant.

Child's toy.

Quai Branly API object 268629
Object
Quai Branly object 71.1935.80.128: Bamba/Okondja rhombe.
Function
Quai Branly API records the Bamba/Okondja rhombe explicitly as a child's toy.
Map confidence
low - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
object record 268629 (Quai Branly API)

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