Orange Springs painted trance-dance bullroarer

!goin !goin

Source term: bullroarer ... or !goin !goin

!goin !goin (|Xam): the bullroarer, a blade whirled on a cord to produce a buzzing sound.

In 1906 Helen Tongue travelled to the eastern Free State and copied in watercolour a dance she found painted on the wall of a shelter above the Caledon River: ranks of people clapping, dancers doubled over, one man flung out horizontal in the air. Low in the composition, set apart from the rest, a small figure stands with both arms lifted and an elongated pale thing held above his head. Sarah Wurz and Petro Keene identify it as a bullroarer, a !goin !goin, the whirring blade the |Xam described. The scene cannot be dated within the roughly 3,000-year span of surviving Maloti-Drakensberg San painting, but it was already on the rock by 1906.

The image depicts a San trance dance in which men and women are clapping and dancing, while one person at the bottom of the image twirls a bullroarer on a string.

Justin Bradfield, report of Sarah Wurz's lecture 'Musicking and human development', South African Archaeological Society, 2024

Particulars

Object

A San trance-dance scene painted in an overhanging rock shelter on the Caledon River, in which one lower figure stands apart with both arms raised, holding an elongated pale object above the head; surrounding implements are discussed as sticks or possible medicine-people's equipment. The scene is known through Helen Tongue's watercolour copy titled 'The Dance', made after her 1906 field visit and published in 1909, now in Iziko Museums' Pre-colonial Archaeology Section. No object was recovered.

Function

Twirled on a string during a San trance dance.