Bembe Tembwe leopard-voice bullroarer

Tembwe

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.'

Le grand esprit M’mùi peut tuer de sa seule voix de cuivre ou de fer, tandis que Tembwe, le dieu-rhombe aux feulements de léopard, rythme, au contraire, l'univers collectif de la culture.

The great spirit M’mùi can kill with nothing but his voice of copper or iron, while Tembwe, the god-bullroarer with the leopard's snarl, instead sets the rhythm of the culture's collective universe.

Gossiaux, Le Bwame du Léopard des Babembe, p. 33

Particulars

Function

The god-rhombe with leopard roars: Tembwe sets the rhythm of the collective universe of Bembe culture, bound to the Butende / Etomba circumcision — a symbolic death and rebirth.