The Bullroarer Atlas

SCHAFFER1980-001 - ethnographic attestation

Ngarankulo, the lodge's night demon

Senegal - Pakao, Sédhiou region (Middle Casamance) - West Africa

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The kankurang, the lodge's masked spirit, with its machete-bearers.
Representative — not this record’s object. · The kankurang, the lodge's masked spirit, with its machete-bearers. · CC BY-SA 4.0 Image source

ngarankulo

Source term: bull-roarer

ngarankulo (Mandinka): a demon-spirit of the circumcision lodge and the bullroarer that portrays it; the board itself is the ngaran.

At night, outside the circumcision lodge, a guardian whirls a thin board of keeno wood on its cord and the ngarankulo speaks. Some take the noise for thunder; others feel the earth tremble. Mandinka boys of Pakao, on the Soungrougrou in Senegal's Casamance, spend the weeks after circumcision in a lodge of millet stalks in a field outside the village, and the force that shapes them there, the Mandinka say, is fear. A novice who will not stop crying may get the kangkurao and the flat of his machete. The ngarankulo has a partner, the jalikono, played by a guardian up a tree burning palm fronds so that sparks rain down. Near the end of seclusion the boys are taught to make both demons. Then the guardians burn the lodge down at night and the boys go home.

To make the ngarankulo, a guardian stands outside the lodge and whirls a bullroarer.

Matt Schaffer and Christine Cooper, Mandinko (1980), p. 99
Object
A small board of keeno wood, shaved until it is light, pierced at one end and swung on a cord.
Function
A demon-spirit whirled outside the circumcision lodge at night to frighten and discipline the novices; near the end of seclusion they are taught how it is made.
Source
Matt Schaffer and Christine Cooper, Mandinko: The Ethnography of a West African Holy Land (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), pp. 98-99; Matt Schaffer (ed. and trans.), Djinns, Stars, and Warriors: Mandinka Legends from Pakao, Senegal (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 80, 89, 98-101 ("Secrets of Circumcision: Ngarankulo", told by Kaidri Drame)
Source location
Page references

Schaffer & Cooper 1980 pp. 98-99; Schaffer 2003 pp. 98-101

Source confidence
high
Location note
Dar Silame, Sédhiou (OSM/Nominatim), village of the lodge chief Nambaly Sagnan quoted by Schaffer and Cooper.

Regions: Africa · West Africa

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