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Bruce Lee's Broken Rhythm Green Bamboo Whip

Handmade to Bruce Lee’s exact specifications by the Golden Harvest Studios in Hong Kong, the "Broken Rhythm" Green Bamboo Whip is one of the most historic, symbolic weapons ever used in martial arts motion picture history. This unique flexible whip was designed to help illustrate the core principles of his revolutionary martial arts system, Jeet Kune Do.

As JKD was a system without fixed positions, Bruce wanted to vividly demonstrate through the use of unconventional weapons that he was not affiliated to any traditional martial arts style or philosophy. The whip, in this instance, becomes a metaphor for speed, flexibility elusiveness and unpredictability.

Bruce Lee’s technique can clearly be seen during his celebrated ‘first floor’ pagoda fight sequence against Guro Dan Inosanto in Game of Death. Prior to facing off against his opponent, who is armed with two red Filipino Kali sticks, Bruce comments on the whip, as follows: “You know baby, this Bamboo is longer, more flexible, and very much alive… and when your flashy routine cannot keep up with the speed and elusiveness of this thing here, all I can say is you’ll be in deep trouble.”. This almost directly parallels his quote about the man being more important than any style or system, a dead piece of wood going up against a flexible weapon that is “very much alive”.

He then continues to ‘school’ his opponent as he fights, a tool used to educate the audience, and to psych out his opponent, breaking down his confidence which in turn makes him less aggressive. Bruce Lee also mentions "Broken Rhythm", a powerful way to confuse an opponent by frequently changing the pace or timing of a fight to throw an opponent off guard.

The Bamboo Whip is 105cm (45.5 inches) long. Bruce Lee was a true innovator in every sense, and this unique bamboo weapon, reinforced with a rubberized protective coating, is a striking example of his ability to illustrate complex principles through dynamic visual means.

Bruce Lee loved the Bamboo Whip so much that the title of his next movie was to be Green Bamboo Warrior, and was to be centered around this weapon.

Bruce Lee's whip is similar to the Sjambok whip! Sjambok or Litupa is a heavy leather whip. It is traditionally made from an adult hippopotamus (or rhinoceros) hide, but is also commonly made out of plastic.

A strip of the animal's hide is cut and carved into a strip 0.9 to 1.5 metres (3 to 5 ft) long, tapering from about 25 mm (1 in) thick at the handle to about 10 mm (3⁄8 in) at the tip. This strip is then rolled until reaching a tapered-cylindrical form. The resulting whip is both flexible and durable. A plastic version was made for the South African Police Service, and effectively used for riot control.

The Sjambok had a variety of uses, with the most obvious being cattle driving. It was heavily used by the Voortrekkers driving their oxen while migrating from the Cape of Good Hope. Even today, the Sjambok is used by herdsmen to drive cattle. They are widely available in South Africa from informal traders to regular stores from a variety of materials, lengths and thicknesses. They are an effective weapon to kill snakes and ward off dogs and other attackers and are still carried in public by many black South Africans for self-defense. Many South African households keep a Sjambok.

The name seems to have originated as Cambuk in Indonesia, where it was the name of a wooden rod for punishing slaves, where it was possibly derived from the Persian Chabouk. When Malayan slaves arrived in South Africa in the 1800s, the instrument and its name were imported with them, the material was changed to hide, and the name was finally incorporated into Afrikaans, spelled as Sjambok.

The instrument is also known as Imvubu (hippopotamus in Zulu), Kiboko (hippopotamus in Swahili) and as Mnigolo (hippopotamus in Malinké). In the Portuguese African colonies and Congo Free State it was called a Chicote, from the Portuguese word for whip.

In the Belgian Congo, the instrument was also known as Fimbo and was used to force labour from local people through flogging, sometimes to death. The official tariff for punishment in this case was lowered in time from twenty strokes to eight, then (in 1949) six, and progressively four and two, until flogging was outlawed completely in 1955. In North Africa, particularly Egypt, the whip was called a Kurbash, after the Arabic for whip. The term Shaabuug is used in the Somali language; it can also refer to a generic leather whip.

You can purchase high quality synthetic polypropylene Sjambok from Cold Steel.