The Bullroarer Atlas

SUBSAH-017 - secondary catalog

Mofu

Mandara Mountains - Gudur, Far North Cameroon - Central Africa

Function not recorded

An African bull-roarer, a slender dark wood blade pointed at both ends with white cord wound near one end; the Mofu rhombe reported from Gudur...
Representative image. An African bull-roarer, a slender dark wood blade pointed at both ends with white cord wound near one end; the Mofu rhombe reported from Gudur in the Mandara Mountains comes from an unrecovered secondary source, and no photograph of it survives. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 1985.18.21) Image source

A single line in a 1951 colonial encyclopedia is the whole record of a rhombe among the Mofu of the Gudur massifs: a flat whirled blade was noted, and then the writer moved on without ever saying what it was for. Its voice is lost to us. Whether it called the rain, warned off the uninitiated, or spoke for the dead, we cannot say among these "men of the rocks," whose chiefs still guard the hidden cult of the mountain spirit high in Cameroon's Mandara range.

Object
Reported Mofu/Gudur rhombe from an unrecovered Guernier secondary entry.
Function
Unrecovered secondary occurrence/use lead for a Mofu/Gudur rhombe; local files do not preserve the Guernier page naming the instrument or describing its use/gender context.
Map confidence
high - approximate territory centroid (mining 2026)
Source location
Cameroun-Togo vol. (Mofu, Gudur)

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