The Bullroarer Atlas

TALBOT1926-003 - ethnographic attestation

Lower Ijaw (Ijo / Izon), Noin-nama cult

Nigeria - Central Niger Delta - Ijo (Ijaw) country - West Africa

Sacred / spirit

Representative—not this record’s object: Baule bonu amuin mask context, shown as a regional stand-in; no image of this record’s own object is...
Representative—not this record’s object: Baule bonu amuin mask context, shown as a regional stand-in; no image of this record’s own object is available yet. Smithsonian NMNH, Department of Anthropology, E435357 (gift of Allen and Barbara Davis) Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

The Ijo lived by the water of the Niger Delta, moving through the mangrove creeks between fishing camps, and bound themselves into societies Talbot ran down one after another: the Sakapu that staged the great Owu water-spirit plays, the Peri of the manslayers, the Suku Ogbo of men who had made the pilgrimage to the Aro oracle. He closed the list with a single line -- the bull-roarer was swung by the Lower Ijaw at the rites of a cult he calls Noin-nama. What the cult was, who was allowed to hear the roarer, and what its booming meant in the creeks, he does not say; that one sentence is all that survives.

The bull-roarer was used by the Lower Ijaw at the rites of the Noin-nama cult.

Talbot, The Peoples of Southern Nigeria, vol. 3 (1926), p. 765.
Object
No morphology recorded; Talbot names a bull-roarer used at the Noin-nama rites.
Function
Bull-roarer used by the Lower Ijaw at the rites of the Noin-nama cult; Talbot records no further detail of the cult or the roarer's role.
Map confidence
low - Central Niger Delta / Ijo regional anchor (Yenagoa area); Talbot names no locality for Noin-nama and his "Lower Ijaw" is a broad division. An eastern-estuarine reading would shift the anchor toward the Kalabari / Okrika-Port Harcourt cluster.
Source location
vol. 3 p. 765

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