The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-157 - museum specimen

Dogon Songo veni bullroarer

Mali - Songo - Bandiagara escarpment - Mopti region - French Sudan - Africa

Restricted

Tapering horn points strung through their tips on a fibre strip.
Representative — not this record’s object. · Tapering horn points strung through their tips on a fibre strip · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

Véni French / Dogon term

Source term: Rhombe / bull-roarer

Veni: Dogon vernacular name catalogued for this bullroarer; no literal gloss recovered

Halfway up the escarpment east of Songo, in a rock shelter Dogon families still use for circumcision, the Dakar-Djibouti mission found wooden bullroarers 'in quantity' on 21 November 1931. This 23-centimetre blade, called Véni, was one of them. The shelter's graffiti stones are repainted red, white, and black after every ceremony. Michel Leiris, who carried the blades to Paris, published their story three years later: rhombes were the ritual gear of the Dogon masked confraternity — the 'mother of the mask,' never to be seen by women or children, carved only by the fully initiated, its betrayal to outsiders cursed with death — and at Songo, newly converted to Islam, they had been laid away with the masks in the rocks of the old village. The confraternity is the Awa, keeper of the Great Mask, carved anew for each sixty-year Sigui to embody the first ancestor, who died in the form of a serpent — the véni was spun for that serpent-ancestor's rites.

auvents à graffiti et bull-roarers de bois en masse

rock shelters with graffiti and wooden bullroarers in quantity

Leiris field journal, 21 November 1931, quoted in Quai Branly object 71.1931.74.2072
Object
Waye-wood slat, 23.2 x 4 x 1 cm and 44 g; elongated rounded blade with one terminal perforation and a small notched tip. No cord survives in the photograph.
Function
Cult gear of the Dogon masked confraternity: Leiris's own 1934 study of the mission's rhombes — the Songo véni among them — records an instrument women and children were forbidden to see, carved only by fully initiated olubaréné, hidden in the mask caves, spun at the sigi, at initiates' seclusion and at their deaths, with revelation to the uninitiated cursed by death. The Songo blades themselves had already been retired when collected, relegated with the masks after the village's conversion to Islam.
Map confidence
high - UNESCO Songo Village coordinate; the exact gallery east of the village is not mapped.
Source location
Page references

object 71.1931.74.2072; collected 21 November 1931

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