Philip J. Shea

Abstract

It is not very oft en that one encounters a truly transnational citizen—one whose worldview and life choices refl ect 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 international 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 fi eld and archival research, fell in love with the country, and decided to make it his home. While his primary academic affi liation was in Nigeria, Shea built and nurtured connections to scholars in several countries in Africa and Europe. He held visiting professorships at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Bayreuth University, Germany. In more than 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 study of 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. He was a fi rm believer in Nigerians telling their own stories and fi nding 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. Shea oft en counseled his students that only with a skeptical eye could the historian unpack historical sources, isolate their biases, and get to the truth. Professor Shea published several articles on the development of the dyeing industry in precolonial Kano; rural production; indirect rule; and Kano’s role in the silk trade. He is most well known for his PhD dissertation, Th e Development of an Export Oriented Dyed Cloth Industry in Kano Emirate in the Nineteenth Century (Department of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1975), which remains the best and most comprehensive work on the nineteenth century Kano textile production and trade to date. His particular contribution was his detailed historical documentation of indigo-dyeing and handwoven cloth production in the Kano Emirate, which considered the material, economic, and technological opportunities as well as the limitations for the Kano textile industry and his discussion of its place in economic history of West Africa. His works on other aspects of Kano textile production, including the silk trade, are also important studies. Philip Shea was born in Winchester, Massachusetts, on July 30, 1945. He received a BA from Swarthmore College in 1967 and a PhD in African history from the University of Wisconsin in 1976. While conducting fi eld and archival research for his doctoral dissertation in Nigeria in 1970–71, he established ties and friendships that convinced him to remain in Nigeria. Aft er the completion of his PhD, 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 renamed Bayero University in 1975. He was promoted to the rank of full professor in 1998.