The Bullroarer Atlas

SUBSAH-033 - museum specimen

!goin!goin bull-roarer of the Kalahari San (Kirby collection)

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

Function not recorded

Representative—not this record's object: a San Schwirrholz from Oas, Omaheke, its edges notched and burnt black.
Representative — not this record’s object. · a San Schwirrholz from Oas, Omaheke, its edges notched and burnt black. · 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
Page references

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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