The Bullroarer Atlas

No. SUBSAH-032

The Powell-Cotton sisters' Angolan roarer

Angola (Portuguese West Africa) · Southern Africa

Function not recorded

Long orange-brown wooden bullroarer collected in Angola in 1937, with a pointed blade, cord at one end and several fibre strips wrapped around its middle.
Plate I. Bullroarer collected in Angola for the British Museum among the Powell-Cotton material, 1937. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Image source

Source term: bullroarer

A wooden bullroarer eighteen centimetres long, strung on fibre, made by Mbundu people in Angola some time between about 1920 and 1936. It came to the British Museum in 1937 from the first Angolan expedition of Diana and Antoinette Powell-Cotton, two English sisters who travelled the southern Angolan and northern Namibian borderlands collecting and filming the life of the villages they passed through.

Particulars

Object
A wooden bullroarer on a fibre string, 18.2 x 3.9 x 1.7 cm, made by Mbundu people in Angola about 1920-1936; British Museum Af1937,0312.71, from the Powell-Cotton Angola collection (Powell-Cotton no. PC.438).
Function
Function not recorded.

Sources

  1. British Museum, Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, Af1937,0312.71 View
  2. Braunholtz, British Museum Quarterly 11(4) (1937), p. 163

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.