SCHWAB1947-001 - ethnographic attestation

Gbunde (Schwab's spelling), Poro society

Liberia - Western Province - Lofa (Gbunde country) - West Africa

Restricted

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!" The bull-roarer, bale wola in Gbunde, was another of these voices — the one that heralded him coming out of the Bush. None of it was made by the man holding the office; it was all made by his escort, which is the point. The devil was a sound the community maintained together, and the people it was maintained against were the ones who had not been initiated.

Often the devil comes from the Bush heralded by a peculiar call. ... The bull-roarer is another of his voices (bale wola, Gbunde). Still another is the imitation of a night bird.

George Schwab, Tribes of the Liberian Hinterland (Peabody Museum Papers 31, 1947), p. 270.

Object

Schwab gives no measurements or material for the instrument itself; he names it only as one of the sounds by which the Big Devil is known. It is listed against the other voice-making gear he does describe in the same paragraph — the "blowing-drum," a small wooden tube with spiders'-nest membranes glued across windows in its sides, and one or two cows' horns membraned the same way (nike viela in Gbunde) — so the bull-roarer is explicitly a separate device from the mirlitons, not another of them.

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.

Map confidence

medium - Zorzor District, Lofa County, Liberia (7.9201, -9.6876 — the district-level point, north-west of Zorzor town). Anchor for Gbunde country; not a findspot.

Source location

Page references

p. 270; glossary s.v. bele wola, Appendix B

• Spirit voice
• Initiation rite
• Forbidden to women

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