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It is made from an adult hippopotamus (or rhinoceros) hide.

The name seems to have originated as sambok in Indonesia, where it was the name of a wooden rod for punishing slaves. When Malayan slaves were imported to South Africa, the instrument and its name were imported with them, the material was changed to hide, and the name was finally incorporated into the Afrikaans, spelled as sjambok.

A strip of the beast’s hide is cut and carved into a strip 3 to 5 feet (0.9 to 1.5 m) long, tapering from about 1 inch (25 mm) thick at the handle to about 3/8” (9 mm) at the tip.

This strip is then rolled until reaching a near circular form. The resulting whip is as flexible as whalebone, and very tough.

A plastic version was made for the South African Police Service , and used for riot control.

When a similar instrument is made from another animal’s hide, it is called a litupa.

The instrument is also known as kiboko (the name for the hippopotamus) in Kiswahili and as mnigolo in Malinke. In the Portuguese African coloniesThe Congo Free State was a private kingdom owned by Leopold II of Belgium between about 1877 and 1908 that included the entire area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The kingdom was the scene of exploitation, greed, and mass killings and it was called a Chicotte, from the PortuguesePortuguese portugues is a Romance language predominantly spoken in Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, and East Timor. With more than 200 million native speakers, Portuguese is one of the few languages spoken in such widely-distributed parts word for whip.