SUBSAH-031 - museum specimen

Timne cane bullroarer, Mabum

Sierra Leone - Northern Province - Mabum - West Africa

Restricted

A bullroarer cut from a length of cane, 63 centimetres long, the natural surface still showing on the back, with a fibre string tied to a small handle at one end. Northcote Whitridge Thomas collected it at Mabum, in the Northern Province of Sierra Leone, among the Timne in 1914. Two of his labels survive. One, in plain English, reads "Bull roarer / Timne (Mabum)." The other, a luggage tag he signed and stamped February 1915, gives the Timne name "Ausif ketokodu," which Thomas glossed as "leopard of katokodu [society]." What that leopard was he published two years later: among the Timne the bull-roarer belongs to the secret societies, as the voice and attribute of their krifi, or spirit. In the Katokodo society the krifi is played by a masked man, cowries and feathers about the eyes and mouth, who disguises his voice behind a calabash and carries the ɔsip Katokodo — the leopard of Katokodo — and is said to swallow non-members. In the Kumunko society, which initiates boys, the krifi carries a palm-midrib bull-roarer on a palm-fibre rope, called "the krifi that walks on his nails" — that is, on tiptoe, softly.

He holds a calabash before his mouth when he speaks in the town and carries a bull-roarer (ɔsip Katokodo, the leopard of Katokodo); he is said to swallow non-members.

N. W. Thomas, Anthropological Report on Sierra Leone, Part I (1916), p. 150, on the krifi of the Timne Katokodo society.

Object

Long cane bullroarer with a small handle and fibre string; Thomas label reads 'Bull roarer / Timne (Mabum)'.

Function

The bull-roarer is the voice and attribute of a Timne secret-society spirit. In Thomas's own report from this fieldwork, the Katokodo society's krifi is played by a masked man who carries a bull-roarer — ɔsip Katokodo, the leopard of Katokodo — and is said to swallow non-members; the Kumunko society's krifi carries a palm-midrib bull-roarer called "the krifi that walks on his nails," and that society initiates boys into membership.

Map confidence

medium - Representative Mabum / Northern Province anchor; exact modern village coordinate not locked.

Source location

MAA Z 14512

• Spirit voice
• Initiation rite

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