The Bullroarer Atlas

SCHAEFFNER1964-001 - ethnographic attestation

Monchon's rhombe in the treetop

Rio Pongo coast, Préfecture de Boffa, Lower Guinea - West Africa

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Representative—not this record’s object: a cane roarer of the Temne, the Baga's kin.
Representative — not this record’s object. · a cane roarer of the Temne, the Baga's kin. · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

Source term: rhombe

Among the Baga of the Guinea coast the great ritual of the forest had two halves. The first belonged to Abul, a spirit and the wife of Bansonyi, the great serpent; the second, the circumcision, was Bansonyi's own. After three months of secret rites in the forest, the men of Abul might invade the village, announced by a crier carrying a palm and by the whirring of a rhombe swung not on the ground but from the top of a forest tree. At once women, children and strangers fled into their houses: doors shut, streets empty, a deathly silence, the village plunged into mourning. Out of the forest came a file of men dressed as women, skirts tight at the ankle, scarves on their heads, shaking the sistrum-rattles of excised girls and simpering as they danced. Life returned only when they reached the centre of the village, and the rite turned to carnival. At the first sowing Abul herself came out into a rice field, as a huge tortoise shell carried by a dozen men hidden under a curtain of fibre.

Le rhombe n'est pas tourné au sol mais du haut d'un arbre de la forêt.

The rhombe is not swung on the ground but from the top of a tree in the forest.

André Schaeffner, Le sistre et le hochet (1990), pp. 174-175
Object
A rhombe, not described, swung from the top of a tree in the forest beside the village.
Function
Announces the men of Abul as they come out of the forest dressed as women to invade the village; at its sound women, children and strangers shut themselves in and put out every light.
Source
André Schaeffner, Le sistre et le hochet (Paris: Hermann, 1990), pp. 171-172, 174-175; André Schaeffner, communication in VIe Congrès international des sciences anthropologiques et ethnologiques, Paris 1960, t. II: Ethnologie, vol. 1 (Paris: Musée de l'Homme, 1964), p. 124; Denise Paulme, "La notion de sorcier chez les Baga", Bulletin de l'IFAN, sér. B, 20…
Source location
Page references

Schaeffner 1990 pp. 171-172, 174-175; Schaeffner 1964 p. 124; Paulme 1958 p. 413

Source confidence
medium to high
Location note
Monchon village, Préfecture de Boffa (OSM/Nominatim), named by Schaeffner as the Baga Foré village of the rite.

Regions: Africa · West Africa

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