No. SCHWAB1947-001
Bale wola heralds the Big Devil
Liberia · Western Province · Lofa (Gbunde country) · West Africa
Restricted
bale wola / bele wola
Source term: bull-roarer
bale wola / bele wola (Gbunde): "devil's voice", the bullroarer.
The Poro Big Devil was heard and never seen. He spoke in a thin, wavering falsetto forced through a "blowing-drum" — a wooden tube with spiders'-nest membrane glued over windows in its sides — and the knack of producing that voice was said to run in families. He sang through three to five assistants blowing pottery whistles tuned nearly chromatically, over a bass note made by blowing an eland's horn into a pot, a note called the "old woman" or the "devil's wife." Several teams sang in relay from village to village so that the sound seemed to travel a mile in seconds, and across the countryside women and children hearing it called out, "There he flies!" He came out of the Bush heralded by the call of membrane-covered cow horns, nike mela; the bull-roarer, bɛlɛ wola in Gbundɛ, was another of his voices. The escort produced these calls and songs; the Big Devil himself supplied his speaking voice. The devil was a sound the community maintained together, and the people it was maintained against were the ones who had not been initiated. For the boys taken into the Bush, the voice became a mouth. The Poro scars cut on a novice were said to be made "by the teeth of the Big Devil in swallowing or 'eating'" him; from then on the devil "carries him in his belly" until the school closes and the survivors are "borne" again. Boys who died in the Bush were said to stay in his belly, because he could not bring them out. The rest came home "new born," pretending to find their own town strange.
Often the devil comes from the Bush heralded by a peculiar call. ... The bull-roarer is another of his voices (bɛlɛ wola, Gbundɛ). Still another is the imitation of a night bird.
George Schwab, Tribes of the Liberian Hinterland (Peabody Museum Papers 31, 1947), p. 270.
Particulars
- Object
- Not described.
- Function
- One of the ritual voices of the Poro Big Devil, sounded by his escorting assistants rather than by the man holding the office, announcing his approach from the Bush and sustaining the fiction that he moves through the air unseen. The uninitiated, women and children included, know him only as a voice.
Source
George Schwab, Tribes of the Liberian Hinterland (Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, vol. 31; Cambridge, Mass., 1947), edited by George W. Harley from the field material of the 1928 Harvard African Expedition, pp. 270, 284-286; glossary s.v. bele wola, Appendix B.