The Bullroarer Atlas

SUBSAH-016 - secondary catalog

Lamba

Copperbelt - Lambaland, Zambia-Katanga border - Central Africa

Play / practical

An Arab bull-roarer, a wood board bound at one end with strips of cloth cord; the Lamba lendya, made from the bulb of a gladiolus plant twirled...
Representative image. An Arab bull-roarer, a wood board bound at one end with strips of cloth cord; the Lamba lendya, made from the bulb of a gladiolus plant twirled on a string, is a very different object with no photograph of its own. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 2005.61.2) Image source

lendya

lendya — Lamba name for the bull-roarer; Doke's vocabulary glosses it as "gladiolus bulb used as bull-roarer."

Etymology. Doke's vocabulary glosses `lendya` as a gladiolus bulb used as a bull-roarer. (high confidence)

Among the Lamba of the Copperbelt, on the Zambia–Katanga border, the bull-roarer was the bulb of the gladiolus plant twirled on a string. The missionary-linguist Clement Doke, who lived among the Lamba from 1914 to 1921 and published his study in 1931, recorded that they called it lendya and applied to it the term intambangoma, their word for a friction drum. But among the Lamba, Doke wrote, the bull-roarer was a child's plaything and had no further significance.

The term intambangoma is also applied to the lendya, or bull-roarer, the bulb of the gladiolus plant twirled on string. But among the Lambas the bull-roarer is but a child's plaything, and has no further significance.

Doke, The Lambas of Northern Rhodesia (1931), "Folklore and Music"
Object
A bull-roarer made of the bulb of the gladiolus plant twirled on a string.
Function
A children's plaything only, whirled for the roaring noise, with no further significance among the Lamba.
Map confidence
high - approximate territory centroid (mining 2026)
Source location
Folklore and Music chapter

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