SUBSAH-041 - ethnographic attestation
Bembe Tembwe leopard-voice bullroarer
Democratic Republic of the Congo - South Kivu (Fizi), mountains above Lake Tanganyika - Central Africa
Restricted
Tembwe French
Tembwe — the Bembe god-rhombe whose voice is the leopard's snarl; a distinct people from the Congo-Brazzaville Bembe.
In the mountains above Lake Tanganyika the Bembe bullroarer is a god, and the god is a leopard. Tembwe — white on one face, red on the other, marked with a chameleon for the beast's power to change shape — speaks with the leopard's snarl and belongs to the Bame alone. Gossiaux recorded a dim memory, alive in the Great Lakes at the end of the nineteenth century, that the leopard had first engendered the kinds of men. The roar is a blade: it drives women out of the circle it traces, and above all it rules the circumcision, the Butende or 'Etomba — 'the corpse' — by which boys are killed and reforged into men. The circumciser who 'kills' and 'swallows' the initiate with his adze becomes Tembwe himself, the leopard who literally creates man. 'Whoever would surpass Tembwe,' the god-rhombe proclaims at his dreaded appearances, 'will die crushed in the bush.'
Tembwe, le dieu-rhombe aux feulements de leopard, rythme l'univers collectif de la culture.
Tembwe, the god-bullroarer with the leopard's snarl, sets the rhythm of the culture's collective universe.
Gossiaux, Le Bwame du Leopard des Babembe, p. 33
- Function
- The god-rhombe with leopard roars: Tembwe sets the rhythm of the collective universe of Bembe culture, bound to the Butende / Etumba circumcision — a symbolic death and rebirth.
- Map confidence
- low_medium - Fizi-territory anchor for Bembe country, South Kivu.
- Source location
- Gossiaux, Bwame du Leopard, pp. 10, 33
- Spirit voice
- Initiation rite
- Death and rebirth