Thurstan Shaw and his African legacy

By CHUKS OLUIGBO

It was from the late Fred N. Anozie (PhD), then a senior lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and coordinator of the Combined Arts programme of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), that I first heard the name of Charles Thurstan Shaw. That was in January 1999. I had just been admitted into the Combined Arts programme and had gone to Anozie to sort out my combination. There were many combinations available, he had told me. One could, for instance, combine History and Archaeology, History and English, English and Dramatic Arts, English and French, English and German, and so on. Up until then I had only known archaeology as a branch – or, as we referred to it in secondary school, one of the sources – of history. In those secondary school History classes, our teachers called it archaeology or dug-out history. And so I didn’t understand what a full-blown Department of Archaeology would be doing. I expressed these sentiments to the amiable doc and he took time to explain to me. It was in the process that he mentioned Charles Thurstan Shaw and his archaeological works in Nigeria and across West Africa. Even though that did not convince me to take on Archaeology, it left me better enlightened.

But that was only part of the gist. I was later to learn that F. N. Anozie hailed from Igbo Ukwu, Anambra State. He was, according to the gist, a mere impressionable youth around the time Thurstan Shaw was undertaking his archaeological excavations in that town. Shaw’s discoveries in Igbo Ukwu had left a lasting impression on young Anozie, who thereafter made up his mind to study Archaeology in the university – and, in my estimation, he turned out a great archaeologist. In his 2003 inaugural lecture “Reflections on History, Nation-Building and the University of Nigeria”, P. Olisanwuche Esedebe, then professor of History at UNN, did refer to Anozie’s contributions to the establishment and development of the archaeology component of the History Department of the university (In 1963, to demonstrate the importance the university attached to African history, the History Department changed its name to the Department of History and Archaeology). Archaeology would eventually develop into a full-blown department, and has now graduated to become the Department of Archaeology and Tourism Studies, in the spirit of the times. Clearly, Anozie et al nurtured succeeding generations of archaeologists who have continued the good work they started – all thanks to Shaw’s influence.

Moreover, it is hard to gloss over Shaw’s imprint in the works of Catherine Acholonu, eminent professor, researcher and culture enthusiast, who has literally made a home in Igbo Ukwu. In a paper she presented during the 2010 Nigerian National New Yam Festival in Igbo Ukwu on recent findings regarding Shaw’s archaeological discoveries in that town, Acholonu said: “In 1990, we began research on the African cultural phenomenon. Our intention was to challenge the misconception that Africa had no long history and that the continent had no contribution to knowledge, technology and global civilisations. Twenty years of research and five major publications later, we have more than enough evidence that Africa was not just the mother of humanity, but the mother of culture and of human civilisations.”

Among other books, Acholonu has gone on to author, based primarily on archaeological evidence, a trilogy on the African past – The Gram Code of African Adam, a 500-page book about the monoliths of Ikom in Cross River State and how they contain evidence that Eden was in Nigeria; They Lived Before Adam: Pre-historic Origins of the Igbo – The Never-Been Ruled; and The Lost Testament of the Ancestors of Adam, Unearthing Heliopolis/Igbo Ukwu – The Celestial City of the Gods of Egypt and India, which answers, among others, such raging questions as: what was the ancient city that the present Igbo Ukwu town is sitting on? Who was the sovereign buried in Igbo Ukwu? And, how far back in time does Igbo Ukwu’s history go?

So, it is not for nothing that Shaw is highly revered in the world of archaeology. Shaw first came to West Africa – specifically to the then Gold Coast (today’s Ghana) – in 1937 to work as an archaeologist. Starting as a tutor, he was later appointed curator of the Anthropology Museum at Achimota College, a post he held until 1945. It was during this period that he made the first archaeological excavations in Ghana at Dawu, near Accra – although some records refer to earlier excavations at the Achimota College farm and at the Bosumpra rock shelter at Abetifi. In the 1950s, Shaw was instrumental to the founding of the Ghana National Museum and the Archaeology Department at the University of Ghana.

In 1959, Charles Thurstan Shaw came to Nigeria on the invitation of the Antiquities Department of the University of Ibadan to embark on an archaeological excavation at Igbo Ukwu. Shaw's excavation revealed bronze pieces that were evidence of a sophisticated Igbo civilisation from the 9th century, marking the most-developed metalworking culture of the time. In 1964, he returned to the town and conducted two more excavations, which also revealed extensive bronzes, as well as thousands of trade beads demonstrating a network extending to Egypt. He also found evidence of ritual practices related to burials and sacred sites.

According to the records, Shaw made further excavations at the Iwo Eleru rock shelter, located about 24 kilometres from Akure in Ondo State, which produced evidence of human occupation of the forest fringes of West Africa during the Late Stone Age and the skeletal remains which show Negroid characteristics had been dated 11,200 ± 200 BP, the oldest known specimen in the West African region at that time.

While at the University of Ibadan, which he joined in the early 1960s as a research professor of Archaeology in the university’s Institute of African Studies, Shaw founded the Archaeology Research Unit of the Institute. He went on to establish a Department of Archaeology, of which he became the founding head of department. There, he would help in nurturing many great archaeologists for the country’s needs.

Shaw founded and edited the West African Archaeological Newsletter, 1964-1970. From 1971-1975, he also edited the West African Journal of Archaeology, successor to WAAJ. In 1970, he wrote a two-volume monograph on Igbo Ukwu and followed it up with two books – Discovering Nigeria’s Past (1975) and Unearthing Igbo Ukwu (1977). It could then be said, and rightly, that it was Thurstan Shaw who initiated the process of re-examining, re-evaluating and reconstructing the African past using archaeology. One would assume he worked closely with Kenneth O. Dike and Saburi O. Biobaku, eminent African historians, who fought, and succeeded, to debunk the obnoxious claim by Eurocentric scholars that Africa had not history but the history of European activities in Africa – as distinguished Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper told the world in 1960.

Born on June 27, 1914 in Plymouth, England, the second son of Reverend John Herbert Shaw and Grace Irene Woollatt, Charles Thurstan Shaw was educated at Blundell's School in Tiverton, then at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University. He received a BA (First Class) in 1936, was awarded an MA in 1941, and then a PhD from Cambridge in 1968 based on an assessment of his published work. Though Shaw departed this physical world on March 8, 2013, it is without doubt that his legacy, particularly in West Africa, will never die.