SUBSAH-040 - ethnographic attestation
Nyanga nyabungubungu circumcision bullroarer
Democratic Republic of the Congo - Nyangaland, North Kivu (Walikale) - Central Africa
Restricted
nyabungubungu English
nyabungubungu — the Nyanga bullroarer and the initiation spirit it voices; a female spirit, the wife of Kabiri.
In the Nyanga circumcision camps of the eastern Congo forest the bullroarer is a wife. Nyabungubungu — an ovoid blade of bwayi wood on a raffia string, swirled only by a licensed specialist — is a feared unseen spirit of the rites, the wife of the spirit Kabiri, and no woman may look on her and live. Biebuyck was told of a woman killed for coming too near the instruments; after she died, they said, Kabiri went on sounding in her belly, for against Kabiri there is no remedy. When the spirits cross a village the women shut themselves indoors, and even a man who peeked through his door-holes and scoffed that it was only 'sticks and a twirling plank they call Nyabungubungu' broke out in wounds over his whole body, healing only when the lodge disbanded. Out in the forest she sounds among percussion sticks, kazoos and a drum around the kirimu, the masked ogre who leads the boys away to be made men.
After she died, Kabiri was still sounding in her belly, for there is no mitigation for Kabiri.
Biebuyck, Nyanga mukumo field text, p. 10
- Object
- An ovoid blade of bwayi wood on a raffia string, made and swirled only by a specialist with formal permission.
- Function
- Circumcision-rite spirit voice: nyabungubungu is a feared unseen spirit of the initiation — a female spirit, the wife of Kabiri — and when she sounds, the women lock themselves in. In the forest the blade sounds beside percussion sticks, kazoos and drum around the kirimu masker.
- Map confidence
- low_medium - Walikale-territory anchor for Nyangaland; Biebuyck's Ihana/Iryamba ritual communities are not separately geolocatable.
- Source location
- Biebuyck, mukumo field text, p. 8
- Spirit voice
- Snake-linked
- Initiation rite
- Forbidden to women