TALBOT1912-001 - ethnographic attestation
Ekoi / Ejagham
Nigeria - Cameroon - Cross River - Oban District - West Africa
Restricted
Enyara Akum English
Source term: bull-roarers
Enyara Akum: Ekoi for "the dark things of the clubs," Talbot's gloss for the bull-roarers used in certain men's clubs.
Etymology. Ekoi term for the bullroarers used in certain men's clubs. (high confidence)
Among the Ekoi of the Cross River, Percy Amaury Talbot recorded bull-roarers used in some of the men's clubs and called them Enyara Akum, "the dark things of the clubs." Formerly they were sounded only in secret, and women were not allowed to see them or to learn what made the whirring noise. In 1920 Robert Lowie seized on the case: he set the Ekoi beside the Bororo of Brazil as peoples who bar women from the bull-roarer, and took the coincidence as evidence that the practice had spread from a single common source rather than arising twice over in two hemispheres.
I know of no psychological principle that would urge the Ekoi and the Bororo mind to bar women from knowledge about bull-roarers and until such a principle is brought to light I do not hesitate to accept diffusion from a common center as the more probable assumption.
Lowie 1920, Primitive Society, p. 313 (citing Talbot 1912, In the Shadow of the Bush, p. 284)
- Object
- Pitt Rivers 1914.26.117 identifies a 178 mm wooden bullroarer as Enyara Akum, collected by Percy Amaury Talbot in the Oban district and attributed to the Ejagham.
- Function
- Secret club bullroarers used in male club contexts; formerly played only in secret, with women barred from seeing them or knowing the source of the sound.
- Map confidence
- medium - Oban, Cross River State regional anchor for Talbot's Oban District / Cross River Ekoi material; not a ritual-site coordinate.
- Source location
- Talbot 1912 p. 284; Lowie 1920 p. 312; PRM 1914.26.117
- Initiation rite
- Forbidden to women