Read our recently published guides to best practices in digitizing text and multimedia resources. Download them today from our "Best Practices" site.

Fuuta Tooro Oral History Project

The Fulbe people have played a prominent role in West African history, and a complete background on the Fuuta Tooro Oral History Project is available as part of this gallery.

As cattle pastoralists, the Fulbe people spread across 2,000 miles of savanna land, from Senegambia in the west to Cameroun in the east, over the last one thousand years. As Muslim revolutionaries some of them established Islamic regimes over the last three centuries in four widely separated zones of the savanna. It was in these areas that they adapted the Arabic script to the writing of their language, Fulfulde, and developed other institutions for the dissemination of Islam in West Africa. More than any other single people, the Fulbe have led in the process whereby Islam has become the majority faith of the savanna region. The interviews below are representative samples from the collection still being digitized for this project.

Interview with Ceerno Daahir Aan: The Toorobbe

Introduction
French translation

Interview with Mammadu Njaari Mben: The Toorobbe and the Deeniyankoobe

Introduction
French Translation
Audio Clip in Pulaar with an English translation transcript

Audio Clip in Pulaar with an English translation transcript. Part I
Audio Clip in Pulaar with an English translation transcript. Part II

 

Sampling from L'Institut Fondemental d'Afrique Noire (IFAN)

Phil Curtin Collection

Collection Boubacar Barry

Collection Charles Becker: Recherches et documents sur le Sida

Photographs from “Passport to Paradise’: Sufi Arts of Senegal and Beyond

Mosques of Bondoukou

Futa Toro, Senegal and Mauritania