PEPPER1969-001 - ethnographic attestation
Ndut (Sereer)
Senegal - Arrondissement de Pambal, Departement de Tivaouane, Region de Thies - West Africa
Sacred / spirit
gum paxa French
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.
- Function
- Sounded in a funerary rite to drive the soul of the dead away from the village; the collection catalogue also glosses its use as exorcism.
- Map confidence
- high - Mont Rolland, Arrondissement de Pambal, Tivaouane (OSM node 3660254647), the locality named in the catalogue entry.
- Source location
Page references
p. 108 and facing photographic plate (PDF pp. 154-155)