The Bullroarer Atlas

WEULE1908-001 - ethnographic attestation

Rovuma roarer among the unyago toys

Tanzania - Lindi hinterland and Rovuma valley (Lindi - Mtwara regions) - East Africa

Function not recorded

Representative—not this record’s object: Amhara bullroarer from Gondar, Ethiopia, a wooden blade on a cord tied to its whip-stick
Representative — not this record’s object. · Amhara bullroarer from Gondar, Ethiopia, a wooden blade on a cord tied to its whip-stick Image source

Source term: Schwirrholz

In the hill country behind Lindi, a boy's great passage was the unyago, his initiation, and its gear passed into play long before he was old enough for it. Small boys practised on the ipivi, single-note flutes played in sets of seven, and carried the kakale, tall black-ringed staffs rattling with seeds, that the new men shook on their return from the forest. Among these toys one bullroarer turned up, and only one.

Object
A single bullroarer, collected among boys' toys; not described.
Function
Not recorded.
Source
Karl Weule, Wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse meiner ethnographischen Forschungsreise in den Südosten Deutsch-Ostafrikas, Mitteilungen aus den deutschen Schutzgebieten, Ergänzungsheft 1 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler, 1908), p. 93; Karl Weule, Native Life in East Africa, trans. Alice Werner (New York: D. Appleton, 1909), pp. 290–291
Source location
Page references

Weule 1908 p. 93 (index: Schwirrholz 93); Weule 1909 pp. 290-291

Source confidence
medium
Location note
Masasi, Weule's main base in the Yao-Makua contact zone; the specimen's village is not recorded.

Regions: Africa

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