The Bullroarer Atlas

SUBSAH-010 - ethnographic attestation

Humbi and Handa

South-western Angola - Huila - Southern Africa

Restricted

A general African bullroarer type: a smooth wooden shaft wound at one end with plaited plant-fiber cord; not the flat lumpoku slat that Kubik...
Representative image. A general African bullroarer type: a smooth wooden shaft wound at one end with plaited plant-fiber cord; not the flat lumpoku slat that Kubik documented among the Humbi and Handa at the ekwendje circumcision camp. © The Trustees of the British Museum (E/Af1926-0414-41) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

lumpoku English

Source term: bullroarer

lumpoku — Humbi/Handa name for the bullroarer, used in boys' circumcision schools

Among the Humbi and Handa cattle-herders of south-western Angola, the bullroarer lumpoku sounds in the boys' ekwendje circumcision camps. Kubik, who recorded one in use at Kamuvia in 1965, describes a flat board some twenty centimetres long whirled on a two-metre string, its rising and falling glissando frightening the non-initiated boys, who take it for the voice of an all-powerful Being. Already in 1951, Gustaf Bolinder had collected a circumcision bullroarer among the Va-Humbe — Kubik's Humbi — whose buzz was set down as the ancestors' voices.

The sound it produces, rising and falling in glissando, provokes fright among the non-initiated boys, who believe it to be the voice of an all-powerful Being.

Kubik, Humbi-Handa, Angola recordings booklet (1965 fieldwork), bull-roarer lumpoku note.
Object
A flat wooden slat about 20 cm by 4 cm with a hole at one end and a two-metre string; Kubik describes one whirled in the ekwendje circumcision camp at Kamuvia in 1965.
Function
Swung in the ekwendje boys' circumcision camps; its rising and falling sound frightens the non-initiated, who take it for the voice of an all-powerful Being.
Map confidence
high - Quilengues Humbi Handa regional anchor not recording archive
Source location
Kubik 1975: 99; Kubik, Humbi-Handa, Angola recordings booklet (1965 ekwendje camp, Kamuvia/Ecuque); SMVK 1953.34.0100 (Bolinder 1951) | CREM CNRSMH_E_1974_004_001_01

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