| An
AODL Exclusive Interview
Phil Curtin
Conducted at his home, December, 2003
Excerpt from Interview: Curtin speaks
about Maalik Sii and the foundation of Bundu:
high resolution
(1.7MB)
low resolution (224K)
Excerpt from Interview: Curtin
speaks about doing oral history:
During the interview sampled here, Curtin speaks
of several publications.
First, his main work on Senegambia, for which the Bundu material
was quite
critical: Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in
the Era of
the Slave Trade, Wisconsin, 1975, 2 volumes. Second, an earlier
volume which
he edited and published as Africa Remembered: Narratives by West
Africans
from the Era of the Slave Trade (Wisconsin, 1967); in that volume
he wrote
the chapter on Ayuba Diallo, a "noble man" from Bundu.
Ayuba (Job) was
engaged in commerce along the Gambia route in the 1720s, was captured
and
exported to Maryland in the Atlantic slave trade; in the 1730s
he gained his
freedom and returned to Gambia and Bundu; one book about him Curtin
alludes
to is The Fortunate Slave . And finally an article which resulted
from some
of the Bundu material, as told by the griots and other informants,
and which
he published as "The uses of oral tradition in Senegambia;
Maalik Sii and
the foundation of Bundu," Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines,
1975.
His main collaborator in the trip to Bundu was the teacher, Hamady
Amadu Sy,
from the Sy or Sisibe family; it was his introductions to the family
which
Curtin followed and which gained him quite remarkable access to
the family,
although not necessarily to Bundu society as a whole.
Curtin was also a very active and important member of the African
Studies
Association at the time; he served on the Research Liaison Committee
in
1965, and in that capacity went to West Africa while Bill Hance,
a
geographer, was going to East Africa. Curtin played the key role
in creating
the Oral Data Committee within ASA. |
