The Bullroarer Atlas

SUBSAH-033 - museum specimen

|'Auni and ‡Khomani Bushmen (San), southern Kalahari

South Africa - Southern Kalahari (Gordonia district, Northern Cape), around Twee Rivieren - Southern Africa

Function not recorded

A large flat wooden Schwirrholz with a line of small burnt-black notches cut along both edges, tapering to a point at the swinging end....
A large flat wooden Schwirrholz with a line of small burnt-black notches cut along both edges, tapering to a point at the swinging end. Catalogued simply as San work from 'Africa south of the Sahara,' it stands alongside the Kirby collection's own !goin!goin and fur fur specimens from the southern Kalahari without being one of them. Haus der Natur, Salzburg (HNS-VK-AfB-0100; on loan from Weltmuseum Wien, Inv. 85.394) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

!goin!goin; fur fur

Source term: rhombe

!goin!goin and fur fur are San (Khoisan) onomatopoeic names for the whirled blade; rhombe is the French museological descriptor, not a vernacular term.

In 1936 the musicologist Percival Kirby joined a University of the Witwatersrand expedition into the southern Kalahari, to Twee Rivieren, where |'Auni and ‡Khomani Bushmen had been gathered, and brought back their bull-roarers. The San called the whirled blade !goin!goin; the dune communities also kept a variant they named fur fur. Several of the slats survive in his collection at the University of Cape Town, catalogued by name and number though without a note of how they were used.

trois rhombes !goin!goin (KK 50, 52, 59) ... deux rhombes fur fur (KK 57, 58)

three !goin!goin bull-roarers (KK 50, 52, 59) ... two fur fur bull-roarers (KK 57, 58)

Emmanuelle Olivier, "Archives Khoisan," Afrique & Histoire 2006/2, note 34 (Kirby collection inventory)
Object
Flat wooden slat whirled on a cord so that it roars (a bull-roarer; Kirby grouped it with the spinning-disks). The Percival Kirby collection at the University of Cape Town holds several southern-Kalahari specimens recorded under two San names: !goin!goin (KK 48, 50, 51, 52, 55) and fur fur (KK 57, 58), catalogued among the Khomani and 'Red Dune' Bushmen.
Function
Function not recorded for these particular specimens; the locked inventory gives only the object and its San names. (Elsewhere the San !goin!goin bull-roarer is reported as a sound-making instrument associated with bees and with rain, but that is not documented for the |'Auni/‡Khomani pieces here.)
Map confidence
medium - Representative point at Twee Rivieren in the southern Kalahari (Gordonia, Northern Cape), where the 1936 University of the Witwatersrand expedition gathered and recorded the |'Auni and ‡Khomani communities from whom Kirby collected these instruments; the specimens themselves are held at UCT in Cape Town.
Source location
Afrique & Histoire 2006/2, p. 195ff., note 34 (rhombe inventory: !goin!goin KK 48, 50, 51, 52, 55; fur fur KK 57, 58); cf. Kirby 1934, p. 179.

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