It’s not very often that one encounters a true trans-national citizen—one whose worldview and life choices reflect the concept of cosmopolitan citizenship. So it was devastating to those of us who had the good fortune of knowing and interacting with the American-Nigerian cosmopolitan, Professor Philip James Shea, to learn of his passing on April 5. A Nigerian resident for thirty six years, Professor Shea died in Kano, where he was a professor of African History at Bayero University.
His cosmopolitan credentials are embedded in the facts of his life, which are a challenge to parochial insularism and constitute a blueprint for living between and across cultures. Professor Shea’s grandparents were Irish immigrants who came to the United States from Canada. He came to Nigeria in 1970 to conduct doctoral field and archival research, fell in love with the country, and decided to make it his home. While his primary academic affiliation was in Nigeria, Shea built and nurtured connections to scholars in several countries in Africa and Europe. He held a visiting professorship at Bayreuth University, Germany, in 1995.
Shea’s inexplicable devotion to Nigeria was matched only by his disdain for what he saw as the crass materialism and a capitalist devaluation of the human in his own country, America. Shea’s love of Nigeria was inexplicable to many of us his close associates because, from our perspective, he was giving up so much comfort that he could effortlessly have in America in order to live in Nigeria. We couldn’t understand his appetite for existential adversity, which increasingly sums up the Nigerian story.
Indeed, he lived through many humiliating and dehumanizing experiences in the country, experiences that would have broken the spirit of anyone with a feeble commitment to Nigeria. He continued teaching in Bayero University in the days when university lecturers’ take-home pay could barely take them home. He used his meager savings in the United States to supplement his salary while rendering what was essentially a free educational service to Nigeria. He was involved in at least two ghastly car crashes in which Nigeria’s terrible roads and poorly-managed traffic were implicated. He was robbed along the Lagos-Ibadan expressway a few years ago and his passport, along with other valuables, was snatched by the robbers. His house in Kano was broken into several times; each time he lost money, electronic items, and other valuables. The last burglary cost him his passport, which he got as a replacement for the one stolen from him a few years earlier. He narrowly escaped being killed in the last religious/ethnic riots in Kano.
Through these bad experiences Shea remained unshaken in his resolve to live and die in Nigeria rather than America. We could never fathom this resolve; it became an inspiration to some of us his associates, to others a source of introspection. Those of us who harbored several degrees of disillusionment regarding Nigeria and who have acted on it to move to North America belonged in the latter category. In moving to Shea’s country, we put ourselves in the odd situation where Shea, an American, welcomed us back to our own country during our visits, and we in turn welcomed him back to his own country during his own visits to the United States. It was odd but wonderful. It was the cosmopolitan spirit on full display.
Shea’s appreciation for Nigeria’s humanity and for its communal ethos—a sharp contrast to the unbridled individualism of his own country—caused us to constantly reflect on the wisdom (or lack thereof) of our sojourn in America. But Shea was never one to judge; he never questioned our choice or made it an issue. While we struggled with guilt that our American friend and mentor believed more in Nigeria than we did, Shea never invoked his transcendental disavowal of material pleasures as a bragging right. Nor did he judge us for our rather tenuous commitment to Nigeria. In fact, Shea encouraged me and several other students of his to seek opportunities for further education in the West on the pragmatic premise that we needed this education to help our country and that, for good or bad, we could get a better higher education in the West where resources abound. He made us feel comfortable in our choices. He was both a pragmatist and a cosmopolitan, and these twin commitments inflected his perception of residential mobility and migration.
I was always struck by his willingness to suspend judgment on Nigeria’s decaying economy and infrastructure; its fractious politics; its recurring social unrest and instability; skyrocketing inflation; and other conditions which have made Nigeria almost unlivable. In retrospect, I recognize that one has to look past these conditions to live and love life in Nigeria. And Shea did exactly that, refusing to get bogged down by the stifling socio-political conditions, and electing to celebrate the humanity of Nigerians rather than the failures of their state institutions and leadership. This choice served him well; he lived a very happy and fulfilled life in a place where he most loved to be. Shea lived a modest life predicated on modest expectations. Anyone seeking to understand why people live happy lives in tumultuous locales will do well to study the live of Professor Shea.
Shea left behind a Nigerian family that he took care of and treated as his own. Some 20 years ago, he hired a house help whom he paid a regular monthly salary. He “married” a wife for him, and the marriage is blessed with six children. Shea was responsible for the upkeep and the education of his house help’s children. In several personal conversations with me, he made it clear that this was a high priority of his; he wanted to give the children as good an education as he could afford. And he did exactly that. All the children attended the Bayero University staff school under his privilege as a professor. The oldest of the children, a girl, attended the highly selective Federal Government Girls College, Kano, and enrolled in Bayero University about six months ago.
This was not a typical Nigerian house-help-employer situation. His Nigerian family—that’s what they were to him—had unrestricted access to his home and resources, and his house help worked for him for only a few hours a day for three days in a week, leaving him with plenty of time to attend to his private affairs. About 15 years ago, recognizing that his house help was under-employed, Shea used his friendship with a Kano factory owner to get him a job as a gardener, a job which he did for two days in a week, earning extra money and utilizing his time optimally. Shea treated his house help more as a friend than as a house help, which was fascinating to me because of what I knew to be the typical relationship between house helps and their employers in Nigeria. Indeed, as someone who abhorred the house help culture in Nigeria but who was pragmatic enough to know that it would always exist, I considered Shea’s relationship with his house help and his family a model for similar relationships across Nigeria.
Shea belonged to a generation of Westerners who moved to Nigeria not to make money but because they loved the people and saw an opportunity to live in a country in which their love for the people and cultures was returned and appreciated and in which they could find professional and personal fulfillment. Yet, he was not one of the feel-good do-gooder Westerners who came to Africa out of Liberal guilt. His love of Nigeria was pure. Shea was a model American-Nigerian. He spoke the best Hausa of any expatriate that I have encountered, as well as some pidgin. His favorite pidgin phrase was “na lie.” In fact his speech pattern had become so Nigerian that even when he spoke to visiting American scholars and expatriates he often lapsed into Nigerianese, describing things or people as 419 in jest.
Expectedly, Shea accumulated many friendships in Nigeria, which he treasured and which helped him enjoy and navigate Nigeria. Shea was friends with many highly-placed Nigerians. One of his best friends is the current Emir of Dutse. His former students, which include Colonel Dangiwa Umar (rtd), a former minister, and a serving one, all adored him and some of them kept in touch with him. Although he was connected to Nigeria’s elite, he felt more comfortable with regular, struggling Nigerians. Most of his friends and associates were members of the working class, who put on no airs and had no pretensions. He constantly hung out with them, doing financial favors for them when they asked, and encouraging and helping many of them to improve their lives through education and better jobs.
In about thirty years of teaching at Bayero University, Professor Shea trained and mentored several generations of Nigerian historians, equipping them with the tools of historical reconstruction and with the scholarly skepticism and the theoretical and analytical skills that any excursion into the African past requires. He was an incisive teacher who had a soft spot for analytical creativity on the part of his students. He was also a painstaking researcher who insisted on exploring all angles to an issue, event, or phenomenon. He was a scholarly perfectionist in that regard, a trait that was appreciated by his colleagues but dreaded by his students.
In a Nigerian academe where social science and humanities scholarship was suffused with an inexplicable primacy of Marxian analytical categories and Marxist devotion to smug dichotomies and structural determinism, Shea was a breath of fresh air. He insisted that agency and contingency were just as important in the movement of history as was the often overblown concept of class consciousness and class warfare. Through his pedagogical intervention, his students, including this writer, became acutely aware of the limitations of Marxian categories for the investigation and analysis of African realities. Although he was particularly circumspect about the crude materiality and excessive economic determinism of Marxism, he was no less suspicious of other Euro-centric intellectual and philosophical constructs, especially transcendental concepts like postmodernism and poststructuralism. He was, in short, a critic of both essentialist and constructivist thinking; he urged moderation in the belief that either offered a sufficient basis for representing complex and shifty human realities.
He was a firm believer in Nigerians telling their own stories and finding their own voices, unencumbered by doctrinal, theoretical, and philosophical conventions. His students learned the virtues oral traditions but were taught to interrogate the processes which produce them and the power subtleties which underlay them. Only with a skeptical eye could the historian unpack historical sources, isolate their biases, and get to the truth, Shea often counseled his students. I will always be grateful to him for this academic and intellectual tutelage. Philip Shea was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, on July 30 1945. He attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania before proceeding to the University of Wisconsin for his Ph.D in African History. While conducting field and archival research for his doctoral dissertation in Nigeria in 1970-71, he forged ties and friendships that made it impossible for him to leave. After the completion of his Ph.D., he took a job with Advanced Teachers College, Gumel, now in Jigawa State. In 1980, he was appointed Senior Lecturer at the Abdullahi Bayero College campus of Ahmadu Bello University, which had become an autonomous university and was renamed Bayero University in 1975. He was promoted to the rank of full professor in 1998. He held visiting professorships at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and Bayreuth University, Germany . He published several articles in Nigerian and international journals on, among other subjects, the development of the dyeing industry in precolonial Kano; rural production; indirect rule; and the central Sudanese silk trade. Professor Shea was my teacher and undergraduate advisor, and he remained my mentor and friend till his death. I will treasure my memories of him and his good works. He was buried in Kano, Nigeria, on Saturday, April 8. May his soul rest in peace.
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Posted by Robot| 17.04.2006 19:08