Rhombe kaiavuru

In Papua New Guinea, rhombes have been used in the provinces of Madang, Gulf Huon and Gulf Papua. But only the rhombes of the Gulf of Papua are of primary importance, particularly to the Elema people.

Douglas Newton and Francis Edgard. Williams both claim that this typical rhombus shape is probably the origin of the elliptical shape of gope boards.

^Williams1 explains that the rhombes from Orokolo Bay are distinguished from the others by a tail-shaped tip reminiscent of the end of Elema ^drums2.

Our beautiful example features this tail-shaped end topped by a hole for attaching a cord.

The main body of the instrument is decorated on one side with a figure, a male guardian spirit, standing with a stylized face, the nose carved in low relief above a smiling mouth revealing a set of teeth. The figure is surrounded by parallel rows of zigzag and diamond-tipped lines. The whole is highlighted with lime.

In the Gulf of Papua, rhombes varied in length from 14 to 55cm and in width from 1.5 to ^7cm3. According to Thomas ^{Schultze-Westrum4} and Williams: “Only the smaller, mostly undecorated examples were actually used as instruments to vibrate the air, producing a sound that rhombe players believed was the voice of spirit-beings. The large rhombes were the ^mothers5 of the smaller ones”.

According to ^Gourlay6; “These mothers were wrapped in pandanus leaves or coconut fibers and stored on the ground behind a row of gope boards in the altar to the awae skulls under the responsibility of one person, usually the head of the local section.

They were particularly powerful, and this was one of the reasons for the attention paid to these great rhombuses, due to their presumed powers and the fear and respect they inspired, even among the oldest members of the group”.

The older a rhombe was, the more imunu magical power it possessed. They were used during important ceremonies, notably the initiation of men, inside ceremonial houses where they could not be seen by women or the uninitiated.

For the Elema, the rhombus is called kaiavuru, which according to ^Newton7, is a “name certainly associated with the word kaiaimunu used further west in the Purari delta by the Namau people to designate the large wicker structures kept at the back of the ceremonial house”. These structures, supposed to represent monstrous animals, transformed boys into men by eating and disgorging them during initiation ceremonies.

Newton adds: “The Elema tribes shared three main cults: those of the rhombus, the bush spirits and the sea spirits. The rhombus cult is thought to be the oldest; in any case, these extremely sacred objects were kept out of sight… The rhombes were not the object of any spectacular ceremony; on the other hand, the cults of the sea spirits hevehe and the bush spirits kovave were celebrated with elaborate pomp, the most important of the two being that of the sea spirits”.

The cycle of the great sea spirits was based on the belief in vast legendary monsters living in the Bay of Orokolo and in the mouths of nearby rivers. These are the ma-hevehe, which is why the ceremonial cycle was called hevehe.

There seems to be a mystical link between the ma-hevehe and the rhombes. In legend, the monster Oa Birakapu terrorized the Elema until he was killed by Purari mercenaries. While they were cutting up his body, the Namau women found the first rhombe (and the hevehe and Kovave masks) in his entrails. The hevehe masks were oval-shaped with jaws, like the aiaimunu masks of the Namau; and Williams suggests “that they were in fact representations of enormous rhombes”.

Notes :

1- Williams, Francis Edgar. 1936 , Bull-roarers in the Papuan Gulf.
Territory of Papua Anthropology Report, n°17, Government Printer, Port Moresby, p.15

2- The term“Orokolo” is generally used to refer to all the Western Elema people living around Orokolo Bay.

3- Ken .A. Gourlay. 1975, Sound-producing instruments in traditional society: a study of esoteric instruments and their role in male-female relations.
New Guinea Research Bulletin n°60 New Guinea Research Unit, Port Moresby and Canberra, p20

4- Thomas Schultze-Westrum. 2013, Bullroarers, Kaiaimunu in Michael Hamson, Collecting New Guinea art : Douglas Newton, Harry Beran, Thomas Schultze-Westrum. pp.187-188.

5- Virginia-Lee Webb in her book Esprits incarnés, planches votives du golfe de Papouasie, speaks on page 38 of ” papas rhombes “.

6- Ken .A. Gourlay 1975, opus quoted pp.23.24

7- Newton, Douglas.1961, Art styles of the Papua Gulf. The Museum of Primitive Art p.25

Price: €13,500