The Bullroarer Atlas

PEPPER1969-001 - ethnographic attestation

Ndut (Sereer) gum paxa funerary bullroarer, Pambal

Senegal - Arrondissement de Pambal, Departement de Tivaouane, Region de Thies - West Africa

Sacred / spirit

Hausa kura ('hyena'): bullroarer.
Representative — not this record’s object. · Hausa kura ('hyena'): bullroarer Image source

gum paxa

Source term: Rhombe GUM'PAXA (GUM'PAHA)

gum paxa (catalogued GUM'PAHA / GUM'PAXA) is the Ndut Sereer name for the whirled blade; the catalogue supplies no morpheme-level gloss.

At Mont Rolland, in the Pambal country north of Thies, Herbert Pepper recorded a Ndut Sereer bullroarer in May 1969 and had it photographed for the Archives culturelles du Senegal. The gum paxa is a slat of wood about thirty-one centimetres long, whirled at the end of a light cord. It was sounded at a funeral, and its work there was to drive the soul of the dead person away from the village — the catalogue files it under exorcism. Pepper's collection also caught a rhombe player at the Plateaux of Dakar a fortnight earlier, so the instrument travelled with its people into the city. The same catalogue lists, a few lines away, a child's buzzing calabash disc called ibir: the Ndut kept the toy and the funerary voice as two clearly different things.

Rhombe GUM'PAXA (lame de bois tournoyant à l'extrémité d'une cordelette), utilisé au cours de rite funéraire afin d'éloigner du village l'âme du défunt.

Bullroarer GUM'PAXA (a blade of wood whirling at the end of a light cord), used during a funerary rite in order to drive the soul of the deceased away from the village.

Pepper, Archives culturelles du Senegal (ORSTOM, 1969), p. 108, plate caption (photo E. Correa)
Object
Whirled wooden blade about 31 cm long, spun at the end of a light cord.
Source
Herbert Pepper, Archives culturelles du Senegal: catalogue des collections audiovisuelles du 10.2.68 au 31.12.69 (Dakar: ORSTOM, 1969), 218 p. multigr., IRD Horizon fdi:04918. Catalogue p. 108 (PDF p. 154) tabulates the 8.5.69 Pambal / Mt. Rolland / Ndut entry "Rhombe GUM'PAHA, us. exorcisme" with recordings b.o.036.07/08/09, 068.09, 068.10 and object 008.01
Source location
Page references

p. 108 and facing photographic plate (PDF pp. 154-155)

Source confidence
high Mont Rolland, Arrondissement de Pambal, Tivaouane (OSM node 3660254647), the locality named in the catalogue entry.

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