MUS2026-366 - museum specimen
Zinder blade on a plaited leaf cord
Zinder (Damagaram), Niger - West Africa
Function not recorded
Source term: svingtræ
Sixteen centimetres of plain wood, split rough at the butt and bored once at the broad end, knotted by a leather thong to a long cord plaited from strips of leaf. Nothing on it is carved or coloured; it is finished only far enough to bite the air. It left Zinder, seat of the old Hausa sultanate of Damagaram, with Ole Olufsen’s Niger expedition on 9 November 1927. Elsewhere in Hausaland bullroarers called in the hunting dogs at Katsina and were boys’ playthings at Daura, where the Mother of the Bush answered the old men at sowing time and they insisted her voice was nothing of the sort. What it did in Zinder no one wrote down.
svingtræ
swing-wood: bullroarer
Nationalmuseet, object 75984 (G.3159)
- Object
- Plain flat wooden slat, 16.5 × 3.6 × 0.3 cm, uncarved and unpainted, split rough at the butt and bored once at the broad end; a short leather thong ties it to a long cord plaited from strips of leaf.
- Function
- Not recorded.
- Source
- Nationalmuseet, Etnografisk Samling, object 75984, inv. G.3159; Hausa, Zinder, Niger; Ole Olufsens Nigerekspedition 1927-1928 (Olufsen, Olaf Hagerup, Harry Madsen); materials "Træ, læder, vegetabilsk"; "Længde 16,5 cm, Bredde 3,6 cm, Tykkelse 0,3 cm"; classification "Kultiske og magiske genstande"
- Source location
Page references
G.3159; object 75984
- Source confidence
- medium Zinder town, the collecting locality named by the catalogue; no quarter or market is recorded.