Timne cane bullroarer, Mabum

Ausif ketokodu

Source term: Bull roarer

the leopard of Katokodo, a Timne secret society

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 katokudo [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 comes out at harvest time and 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.

The krifi is a stone and a small ant-hill; it is called katagbɛmpi and is represented by a man wearing a mask with holes

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

Particulars

Object

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