Interview of Aidan Southall by Alan Macfarlane 7th July 2005


0:05:07 Introduction; born 1920 at Nuneaton, Warwickshire; father was an Anglican parson who died aged 56; mother lived as a typical parson's wife; both parents influenced me by the example of their lives; always a Christian

4:05:19 Rural vicarage at Dullingham, near Newmarket; taught at home by an old friend of my mother's; later sent to the Perse Preparatory School in Cambridge and then on to the Perse School; felt I was a poor mathematician but made a huge effort to get a credit in School Certificate examination; W.H.D. Rouse; prefect and later head of a house; games; Reddaway family; Max Warren, later a Canon of Westminster, encouraged me to apply to Jesus College, Cambridge, and got an Exhibition there and later got a scholarship

12:09:04 For Higher Certificate had taken classics and ancient history; from 1939 read anthropology where supervisor was Jack Dryberg; J.H. Hutton was the Professor; physical anthropologist was Jack Trevor; after two year tripos  was a concientious objector and told to get a public service job in London; met Mary Trevelyan who had started Student Movement House which catered for overseas students; had a house in Gower Street which was run as a club; became a sub-warden there which counted as my war service

18:40:17 In my last year at the Perse was invited to go to the West Indies during the long vacation which was my first experience outside England; Dryberg had advised me to take 'The Mind of Primitive Man' by Franz Boas to Jamaica; contemporaries included Kenneth Little; London School of Economics was evacuated to Cambridge during the war; did a couple of book reviews for the Royal African Society which were seen and liked by Audrey Richards and Raymond Firth; one of the reviews was of Nadel's 'Black Byzantium'; directed towards East Africa by Audrey Richards; needed to get a job and told of a teaching post at Makerere in Uganda in social studies; although the war had ended there was no transport; managed to get to Cairo and from there by flying boat to Lake Victoria and Makerere.

30:13:24 Makerere already had an impressive central building; put up by the Principal, George Turner, and accompanied him on his evening walks into the bush; eventually allocated a new-built house; Turner sent me to speak with Batten, the Vice-Principal, who suggested I lecture from Lord Hailey's 'African Survey' but dull to work with so I didn't do so; there were just 200 students at that time all specially chosen from secondary schools all over East Africa; they did two-year courses; standards rose and eventually Makerere qualified for a London University scheme to give their degrees; later became a university

35:49:17 Being an anthroplogist; Malinowski; influenced by sociologists; Audrey Richards gave me a job at the East African Institute of Social Research after Makerere; anthropology and fieldwork; own experience of fieldwork in West Nile district of Uganda; agricultural practices; maize beer; dance;

48:16:17 Other areas of fieldwork; for social survey of Kampala got a fellowship to study sociology in U.S.; Talcott Parsons; Peter Gutkind joined me as assistant on the Kampala project; did a book together on slum area on outskirts of Kampala, 'Townsmen in the Making'; 

55:53:13 [Evans-Pritchard] and relationship with him; Audrey Richards' advice; visits to Oxford; Meyer Fortes and kinship; own book on cities and civilization and influence of Marx and Weber; Chinese and Japanese cities; Africa and the effects of colonialism; global self-destruction