| Thurstan Shaw (Independent Scholar, United Kingdom),
Peter Ucko and Kevin MacDonald (University College London, United Kingdom)
p.ucko@ucl.ac.uk,
kevin.macdonald@ucl.ac.uk
In the last quarter of the century, the Nigerian archaeologist
Bassey Wai Andah represented a symbolic figure among the consolidating
and promoting actors in modelling the endogenous perspective of the anthropological
archaeology of/in Africa (Bagodo 1999:11-12).
Introduction
In 1964, when one of us (TS) was a Research Professor in the University
of Ibadan and giving open lectures on archaeology, and seminars in the
History Department, a final year History student came to enquire about
a career in archaeology, and how best to equip himself for this. It was
some years before the teaching Department of Archaeology was established,
and although the Vice-Chancellor, Dr Kenneth Dike, was supportive, the
university was not then in a position to offer teaching either for first
or higher degrees in archaeology. The young man who made these enquiries
was Bassey Eteyen Wai Ogosu. (He later changed his name to Bassey Wai
Andah following a dispute with his father.) At the time of his enquiries,
Bassey made a profound impression by his keenness and determination. Years
later he told one of us (PU) how he had believed that archaeology was
a subject which had the power to help the poor and those suffering from
discrimination. In 1964 he was offered a job in the Nigerian Department
of Antiquities but decided instead to accept a Nigerian Federal Government
Scholarship to study in London. There have been suggestions by some that
even at this early stage in his career, Bassey was something of a rebel!
Bassey had originally been accepted in September 1964 to
study for an MA in African Archaeology at London University’s School of
Oriental and African Studies, but there was already concern that he might
need also to study at the Institute of Archaeology. After his arrival
in London in January 1965, the School of Oriental and African Studies
reported to the London-based Commonwealth Scholarship Commission that
“it was clear that his interests would be better met at the Institute
of Archaeology”. After successfully passing an MPhil Qualifying Examination
after only six months attendance at lecture courses on a range of archaeological
topics at the Institute, he was then registered in its Human Environment
Department “for an (old style) M.A.” while “making a study of prehistoric
environments in Central Africa” (G.W. Dimbleby to Daryll Forde, 11/3/1966)
(and subsequently for the “M.Phil. and M.A. (Old Regulations) on Relationships
between man and his environment in Africa south of the Sahara”). However,
at the time there was no specialist Africanist in the Institute, and to
a considerable extent Bassey must have been forced to work alone. He certainly
attended a course of lectures by one of us (PU) on Anthropology for Archaeologists,
and requested permission to have extra tuition from him. It is also known
that he participated in excavations in Suffolk and in Cambridge (under
the direction of Dr John Alexander, a year later to be one of Bassey’s
(MPhil) examiners) and that he joined Henry de Lumley’s training course
at Lazaret in France. In the summer of 1966 he was funded to join Eric
Higgs’ survey and excavation in Epirus, Greece.
Throughout this period in London, Bassey was apparently
very badly-off financially. He first lived in comparative isolation in
lodgings near Lancaster Gate, and subsequently in the William Penson Hall
of Residence. According to a very favourable reference (3/2/1966) from
Professor J.D. Evans in support of Bassey’s application to the African
Graduate Fellowship Program:
Mr. Bassey Wai Ogosu is undoubtedly a young man of high
intellectual calibre... Though undergoing considerable... strain because
of continuing difficulties about grants, etc... Though sensitive and highly
strung he has great determination and is capable of carrying on a programme
of work under stress of various kinds. Personally, [he] is a man of great
charm, and he seems to find no difficulty in getting on well with all
sorts of people.
After a month of hospitalization, he completed his thesis,
finally entitled, “Past and present relationships between man and his
environment in Africa south of the Sahara (Being an attempted appraisal
of the relationship between man and the environment from Later Prehistoric
times onwards)”. In this he demonstrated his interest in the origins of
African food production through review and analysis of existing literature.
Bassey was awarded an MPhil degree in July 1967.
Rebel or not, Bassey then faced a critical decision: whether
to return to Nigeria, with its incipient civil war (which had been one
of his main cause of stress in addition to financial considerations),
or whether to continue with his postgraduate studies. In the event, after
much discussion and having rejected a Gulbenkian studentship to research
“the earliest agricultural and pastoral societies of East Africa”, he
chose to go to the University of California at Berkeley, to work under
Professor Desmond Clark for a PhD.
As Professor G.W. Dimbleby, who had been his Supervisor
at the London Institute of Archaeology, wrote (26/1/1966):
[Bassey] wishes to continue to study the relationship of
early man to the African environment, to build on the basic work he is
doing now. Had we had the staff experienced in such work we would gladly
have enrolled him here, but as we have not, certain American Universities
are his best hope. With his outstanding keenness and industry and a higher
average ability he should bring credit to his university, to himself and
to those who sponsor him.
Not much later, in October 1967, Bassey was again worrying
about money; another reference from Dimbleby, to Professor Karl Butzer
who was a possible source for providing a grant if Bassey was to move
to Chicago, makes fascinating reading:
[Bassey] showed a remarkable grasp of what he had read
(especially considering that his background was not in the sciences),
and his diligence in seeking out the very diverse and diffuse literature
was most creditable... He certainly needed guidance in putting his...
thesis together... Apart from this one weakness, I can recommend him as
intelligent, keen and industrious, with a firm idea of what he wants to
do...He is very likeable and was popular with his fellow students. I should
like to see him given the chance to reach his full academic potential.
Bassey managed to stay on at Berkeley and, in connection
with his PhD research, he undertook excavations in Ghana and Burkina Faso
(then Upper Volta), thus avoiding returning to Nigeria for fieldwork.
In the summer of 1968 he had applied for a Research Fellowship in Archaeology
at the University of Ghana, and he managed to combine his PhD program
with lecturing there. Later he was often to repeat how much he disliked
his time in the USA, where he was seen to keep very much to himself and
maintain a low profile, without any friends amongst his student colleagues.
In 1973 he successfully gained his PhD with his thesis on “Archaeological
Reconnaissance in Upper Volta 1970-1972”.
By then it was clear, however ‘difficult’ or independent
of spirit he might be, Bassey was assured of a distinguished career in
archaeology. Indeed, one of us (TS) entered into a polite, but fairly
fierce, competition for his services with Professor Merrick Posnansky,
Head of the Archaeology Department in the University of Ghana, who wanted
him for his Department. Ibadan won, and Bassey joined the staff of
the Department there as a Lecturer in 1973. Only one year later
Bassey aspired to succeed Thurstan Shaw as Head of the Department when
the latter retired in 1974. This turned out to be a premature bid, and
served to add weight to those who were already suspicious of him. Nevertheless,
Bassey had already proved himself to be an exceptionally good teacher,
and had shown the originality of his thinking about the problems of archaeology
in an African context. He also demonstrated the width of his concern for
student welfare generally, and in particular in his involvement with the
university football team and its coaching.
The Department of Archaeology
and Anthropology
In 1978 Bassey was promoted to the rank of Professor and was appointed as
Head of the Department of Archaeology at Ibadan. He quickly made his mark
upon it and developed it in new and expanding ways. Those planning the
new Department of Archaeology in the late 1960s (TS) wanted it to have
an anthropological dimension, but came up against the situation that anthropology
was suspect as having been used as a tool of colonial government. A second
obstacle was that sociologists had no sympathy for the suggestion that
the discipline of (an anthropologically-oriented) archaeology should be
sited in the Faculty of Social Sciences.
Thus it was left to Bassey, some ten years later, when
the climate was more favourable, to turn the Department of Archaeology
into a Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, and to integrate the
two disciplines in a most productive way. Bassey was in a good position
to do this, having been introduced to ideas about the relationship of
archaeology and anthropology at the Institute of Archaeology in London,
and then having done further postgraduate training in an American university,
where archaeology was, as usual in that continent, embedded in a Department
of Anthropology. To Bassey, the teaching program of the Ibadan Department
of Archaeology when he took it over, had a very British outlook and bearing.
Its designers saw their primary duty as disseminating information about
prehistoric man world-wide, including Africa, and secondarily, providing
a few students with some training in the science of archaeology (Andah
1997:13). The designers of the original program were indeed British, in
fact mostly trained in the Archaeology Department of the University of
Cambridge; that was the best they knew, and the best they knew was what
they were trying to pass on. This sort of thing happened elsewhere, of
course, when British academics were trying to initiate university education
in former colonies. The University of Ghana was modelled on Jesus College,
Cambridge, even to the use of some of its anachronistic medieval terminology.
As far as the Department of Archaeology in the University of Ibadan is
concerned, “at this early
stage a career in archaeology and museum curatorship did not appeal much
to students, perhaps because the program as then structured, failed to
indicate what relevance these disciplines had to contemporary living and
the resolution of problems facing present day man and his societies” (Andah
1997:13). We have seen how this line of thinking had been stimulated by
Bassey’s concept of archaeology from the time he decided to make it his
career, and no doubt it may also have been coloured by his strong Christian
beliefs (in 1984 Bassey left the Anglican Church to become an Elder of
the Presbyterian Church of Nigeria). Consequently, a primary goal of reorganization
was seen by Bassey to be that of “drawing up programs to train the cadres
of cultural experts that would be right for, and would function effectively
in, modern African societies” (Andah 1997:15). As a first practical step
it was found necessary to clarify just what curators and museums were
and should be with particular reference to African historical experience.
As Bassey (1997:17) said:
The prime objective of the reorganization of our degree
programs was thus to make the courses more practical in outlook and more
relevant to the developmental needs and aspirations of contemporary Nigerian
and other African societies... By the early 1980s our archaeology program
had adopted an anthropological outlook, and a fully fledged degree course
in anthropology began to be offered in addition to the new look archaeology
program.
Courses
were introduced in cultural resource management. These were:
developed into an important facet of both [the] archaeological
and [the] anthropological degree programs. [They] serve, together with
ethnoarchaeology, to link [the] study of past and present [and] also help
greatly in removing the largely artificial separation between prehistoric
and historical and... to offer training directly relevant to museum needs
(Andah 1997:17).
As far back as the 1930s, at Achinoca College in Ghana,
which was designed to become the springboard and nucleus for a future
university, keen discussions used to go on among the staff, of whom one
of us was one (TS), about what was the most suitable form of education
in an African context. The staff were c1ear that they did not want to
impose on Africa a totally alien, European type of education, like the
French did in their territories. But the aim was to combine the best in
both African and European traditions more easily expressed as an ideal
than actually carried out! African traditions were encouraged in language,
music, dress, dancing and art, contrary to ideas still prevailing at that
time in many missionary educational circles. But it did not go much further
than that. It was left to Bassey Andah to give greater expression to this
basic idea of making the greatest possible use of indigenous African traditions.
He felt strongly that development in any sector of society needs to receive
stimulus and direction from that society’s cultural pool of wisdom.
Therefore he aimed to provide students with a range of
competences not available in the purview of the natural, social or historical
science curricula but which he regarded as crucially needed within the
educational framework in order to be connected to these cultural reservoirs.
He became more and more convinced, as a result of actually operating such
programs, that the big challenge facing societies such as those of Nigeria
today, was to design and execute courses in public archaeology and anthropology.
These would enable them to undertake the kinds of cultural resource management
projects that contribute directly and positively to their societies’ progress
and development today.
Research and Published Work
Bassey Andah published prodigiously. He wrote about 70 journal articles
and chapters in books, as well as four books of his own. He coedited a
further six books on African archaeology. At the same time he edited the
West African Journal of Archaeology
from 1978 onwards and kept it going for 20 years in the face of horrendous
financial and logistic difficulties; this was one of his greatest contributions.
His impact on scholarship in anglophone West Africa as an educator, synthesist
and general theorist was considerable. In broader terms he is well known
as a pioneering advocate of indigenous archaeologies, striking out against
the hegemony of the Western world view, and urging the establishment of
an African archaeology meaningful to Africans.
In the scholarly life of Bassey Andah, stretching over
almost 30 years, one can perhaps discern four distinct phases. In the
first of these, while doing his MPhil in London, the basic principles
and techniques of archaeology were laid down, and the seeds sown of his
anthropological orientation. In the second, the impact of his doctoral
education within the ecological, functionalist and stone oriented Anthropology
Department at Berkeley of the early 1970s is evident. In the third, beginning
in the 1980s, Bassey became increasingly concerned with distancing himself
and Africa from Euro-American archaeologies, a move which shifted his
focus towards theory, synthesis and education in Africa in general. In
the final phase, cut short by his untimely death, Bassey strove to reconnect
his commitment to African archaeology with a broader world view, embodied
in his Presidency of the World Archaeological Congress (hereafter, WAC).
Common to all of these phases of Bassey’s intellectual life was an unyielding
commitment to the questioning of stereotypes and cultural models foisted
on Africa earlier this century by European writers. There were others
before Bassey who had rejected the conception of Africa as a passive cultural
backwater, pliant to ideas and technologies from Eurasia, and replaced
it with one which recognizes the diversity and antiquity of Africa’s achievements
and cultural resilience, but it was Bassey who developed this rebuttal
with a fiercely crusading spirit.
Shortly after Bassey began his doctoral research at Berkeley
in the late 1960s, he began to publish on the Early Stone Age of West
Africa (Wai Ogosu 1972, 1973b, 1974). His research into this subject,
to which he would return throughout his life, was driven by the paucity
of good archaeological evidence for the Early Stone Age in West Africa,
and an interest in the role that the forest might have played in early
hominid adaptations. He criticized the implicit racism of Carleton Coon’s
(1962) “candelabra theory” of human evolution and the origin of races,
attacking in particular the notion that tropical Africa and its rainforest
had been unfavourable for human progress and had been responsible for
African cultural backwardness (Wai Ogosu 1974).
Bassey did not concern himself much with Early Stone Age
activity and occupation occurring in the more lightly-vegetated parts
of West Africa, characterized by those tool forms universally designated
Acheulian by archaeologists (Soper 1965; Shaw 1978:26-30). Rather, he
concentrated his efforts on the forests and coastlands from Nigeria westwards
and the industry generally referred to as the Sangoan or the San Lupemban
technocomplex. The Sangoan is widely believed to be a successor to the
Acheulian tradition, its date variously estimated as between 250,000 and
45,000 bp. Bassey questioned the appropriateness (principally on typological
grounds) of applying the term Sangoan, originally applied to Central African
assemblages, to any assemblage in West Africa. Through his work at the
key site of Asokrochona in southern Ghana, he attempted to call into question
the validity of automatically terming the earliest industry there Sangoan
with all its implications for the earliest peopling of the African forests
(Andah 1979). Since an absolute age estimate was unobtainable for the
early Asokrochona assemblage, in the absence of datable organics or appropriate
dating technology at the time, its putative date hung on typological arguments.
Bassey argued (Andah 1979), on grounds of an attribute-based analysis,
for an association of the earliest assemblage at Asokrochona with the
Developed Oldowan or Lower Acheulian, giving an estimated age of 1 to
2.5 million years old. Other researchers (Nygaard and Talbot 1984) saw
in the assemblage’s picks, bifaces, core axes and choppers satisfactory
indicators for a Sangoan association, an argument supported by most subsequent
syntheses. However, until such localities in West Africa have absolute
dates assigned to them on the basis of associated deposits, the verdict
must remain sub judice.
Bassey’s PhD thesis on “Archaeological Research in Upper
Volta 1970-1972” further expanded his attention to issues concerning
the emergence of cultivation in West Africa (Wai Ogosu 1973a), a topic
of lively interest among archaeologists at the time, as seen in the 1972
Burg Wartenstein symposium on “Origins of African Plant Domestication”
(Harlan and De Wet 1976). His excavation of a long open-air sequence at
Rim (Burkina Faso) remains one of West Africa’s major data points for
the early to mid Holocene. But here again, definite organic evidence was
missing, and Bassey had to argue for subsistence intensification on the
basis of artefactual change (the appearance of grinding stones and picks),
ecological arguments, remnant terrace systems and even oral traditions
concerning the cultivation of cereals. From these lines of evidence he
hypothesized the beginnings of cultivation by c. 3600 bp (Andah 1980).
Here, Bassey’s hypotheses have been borne out by recent work by Vogelsang,
Neumann and others in northern Burkina Faso, indicating the beginning
of agricultural systems there about 3500 bp (Breunig
and Neumann 1996).
The essentially ecologically-driven approach which Bassey
brought to these research interests were reflective of the late colonial
paradigms of expatriate researchers in Africa. In a recent survey of archaeological
theory in Africa, Bruce Trigger (1990:314) has noted that:
While ecological approaches in the 1960s tended to interpret
cultural changes more as automatic ecosystematic response than as voluntary
human behaviour, the result was to add a new dimension to African culture
history that stressed cultures as functioning systems. This in turn laid
the basis for understanding prehistory in terms not only of diffusion
and migration, but also of internal transformation of cultures.
Bassey’s first work was undoubtedly part of this advance. However, the ecosystem
approach to African prehistory can also be seen as a means of avoiding
more highly-charged enquiries into the more recent peoples and history
of Africa. Concern with the endless dance of environmental change and
human response was ultimately, for Bassey, culturally sterile.
Perhaps prompted by these concerns, which were to emerge
strongly in his later works, Bassey began to turn to more recent periods.
In 1976 he published the very prescient article “An Archaeological View
of the Urbanisation Process in the Earliest West African States”. In it
he proposed that the origins of historically-known states and cities of
the West African forest were earlier than previously believed. He averred
that scholars had been overly reliant on potentially-biased Arabic sources,
tending to attribute the origins of states to the stimulus of external
trade, rather than internal developments. He advocated regional studies
of urban emergence in Africa, sampling sites from each microenvironment
of the region studied, so as to learn better each site’s function and
its role in local trade, subsistence and social systems. Indeed, he predicted
(Andah 1976:6) that:
the crucial factors which made possible the development
of the towns of Old Ghana... are to be found in the preceding iron age
developments and the associated ability of indigenous folk to perceive
and exploit both natural and social resources... in more sophisticated
ways than before.
This timely prediction has been strongly supported by the
work of Roderick and Susan McIntosh at Jenne Jeno in Mali, where local
trade networks and the exploitation of diverse resources are seen as playing
a key role in the advent of this urban centre almost 400 years before
the first introduction of Islam to West Africa (McIntosh and McIntosh
1980, 1993). However, despite the role which western research was beginning
to play in dispelling many of the old myths about Africa. Bassey began
to become increasingly suspicious of it and its ultimate impact on African
archaeology.
African Archaeology for Africans
In December 1983, Bassey had attended the 9th Congress of the Pan African
Association of Prehistory and Related Studies meeting in Jos, Nigeria.
There he had participated in the debate on the question of the participation
in international archaeological conferences by South Africans, and was
present when the motion was carried which:
...unequivocally
condemn[ed] (on scientific grounds) the practice of apartheid and any
other forms of discrimination; reject[ed] racist criteria used anywhere
to restrict education, research, and employment opportunities...; call[ed]
for a cessation of all contacts with South African institutions; call[ed]
for the censure of colleagues and institutions maintaining links with
South African institutions. (Ucko 1987:37-38; Andah et
al. 1993:xv-xvi)
By the time of his inaugural lecture as Professor of the
Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Ibadan
in 1985, Bassey had formulated a very clear agenda for archaeology in
Africa. In this lecture he emphasized the need for self-reliance on the
part of African scholars and departments, and for active delinking from Western partners, stating (Andah 1985 n.d.:3):
I suggest here for the African man to fully understand
his present situation, he must trace his roots and course of his journey
to the present; and to make meaningful progress in the future he must
not only appreciate, but also appropriate his cultural history.
As to delinking from exterior scholarship, he compared
the process to
the same way a sensible woman hard pressed by an overbearing
and domineering suitor delinks, i.e. makes herself scarce if not completely
unavailable to the suitor. The advantage of so delinking is that the person
or people in question give themselves the opportunity to take proper stock
of their relationship with their erstwhile colonial masters, now self
proclaimed friends... and really study themselves closely and critically
so as to derive whatever their pool of historical knowledge has to offer
the planning process. (Andah 1985 n.d.:26, 27)
Delinking had numerous implications for education both
in terms of teaching (wanting to foster African, rather than expatriate
led departments, and Africa-based, rather than Euro-American-based, graduate
programs) and textbooks (wishing to have African written, printed and
distributed text matter). In essence, there was to be an effort to transform
the largely alien institutions
of Africa to authentically African ones. Bassey was not slow in following
his newly-charted course. Although sometimes confusing to outsiders unaware
of his plan of action, issues of the West
African Journal of Archaeology, packed with continent-wide synthetic
pieces by himself and associated scholars, began to appear (Andah and
Okpoko 1987; Andah 1988b, 1990). The culmination of this trend was the
1994 publication of a uniquely African manual of methodology and theory,
Practising Archaeology in Africa (Andah and Okpoko 1994).
Relinking with World Archaeology
Soon after announcing his delinking strategy for African archaeology, Bassey
attended the first WAC in Southampton in 1986. This meeting would have
left him in little doubt that he was not alone in his quest for an endogenous
archaeology. Indeed, it must have become apparent that elements of Western
archaeology had moved on significantly from the ecological and processual
paradigms against which he had turned. As one of the editors of The
Archaeology of Africa: Food, Metals and Towns (Shaw et
al. 1993), a volume that emerged from the Southampton Congress, he
made (together with two of the other editors) a critique of the historic
ills of African archaeology, with some suggested solutions (Sinclair et
al. 1993). In particular, the application of chrono- technological
schemes derived from European archaeology were condemned (e.g. notions
of distinct Neolithic and
Iron Age periods), as were the historic and potential abuses of definitions
of ethnic movements and consequent innovations (e.g. Hamitic and Bantu
expansions).
To the latter subject, the so-called Bantu expansion, Bassey
brought all his reforming zeal (Andah 1998). In claiming that archaeologists
have done less than justice in their reconstruction of the real landscape
imagery of the Bantu peoples, he himself declared that his treatment of
the subject was more a process of deconstruction than reconstruction.
For nearly two decades Bassey conducted widescale research in part of
the area often put forward as the Bantu homeland, in the Katsina Ala section
of the Middle Benue Valley occupied by the Tiv people (Andah 1983). He
concluded that these researches had not turned up any evidence to support
the idea that this area was an early centre for the development of food
production and iron working, much less for the thesis that it was part
of the possible cradle area of early Bantu language and Bantu cultural
evolution (Andah 1998). He condemned the equating of Bantu history with
Iron Age pottery typology, and the traditional archaeological criteria
for pot classification instead of indigenous African criteria. He was
certainly right in pointing out the shortcomings of many excavations treating
Bantu cultural history as not having yielded enough faunal, floral and
other materials for identifying staple species exploited, and for tackling
the questions of when and how farming was commenced. He further saw the
necessity for a combination of large-scale and test-pit excavations for
sampling sites representative of a region, in order to establish an adequate
archaeological data base (Andah 1998).
WAC1, and After
In 1986, widespread controversy was aroused by the decision of the organizers
of a world conference of archaeology to exclude participants from South
Africa and Namibia as an expression of disapproval of that country’s racist
policy of apartheid at that time (Ucko 1987; Shaw 1989). From his side,
Bassey must have received enormous strength from finding so many colleagues
from across the world adopting an ethical and proactive social and political
stance over the matter of institutionalized, legalized racism in an African
country. From the organizers’ side, there was no doubt of the commanding
eminence that Bassey Andah occupied within African archaeology. Some of
his Nigerian archaeological colleagues, perhaps lacking his charisma,
anxiously awaited his eventual, though late, arrival at the Congress;
they were no doubt dreading the possibility that it would have to be they
who would be filmed on the television program Heart
of the Matter, in what proved to be an acrimonious debate with the
then South African Ambassador to the UK, and Professors John Evans, David
Lewis-Williams and others. In the event it was Bassey who stunned the
British television audience with his eloquence, his passion and his personal
integrity. No one who watched the program will ever be able, nor wish,
to forget some of his impromptu phrases, such as his statement directed
at the South African Ambassador:
If you don’t accept [that Blacks and Whites belong to the
same species] why should I parley with you? Why should I allow you to
dance around with me? I think that’s the issue, isn’t it?
Bassey’s ongoing negativism towards the colonial derivation
of the archaeological discipline, and its development within Britain and
America especially, did not affect his admiration and appreciation of
some of his British colleagues. This was perhaps most evident in his superb
organization and handling in November 1989 of what he called “an International
conference...held at the University of Ibadan in honour of Professor Thurstan
Shaw, pioneer Head of that University’s Department of Archaeology, founding
editor of the West African Journal
of Archaeology, and a true doyen of African archaeology” (Andah 1998:1).
The conference has produced three major publications. His aims in organizing
this important event reflected at least two of Bassey’s ongoing preoccupations:
the evil influence of colonialism, and the need to improve social conditions
in Africa. In Bassey’s view, conferences:
should consciously and systematically help draw the attention
of Africans, especially those saddled with the responsibility of designing
and executing development plans for, and of, their societies and lands,
to ways and manners in which they can effectively counter all extraneous
(especially colonial) and internal influences known to be hampering healthy
societal development (Andah 1998:2) and that the study of Africa’s past
should, if practised correctly, allow “a reconstruction of Africa’s usable
cultural knowledge systems and resources” (Andah 1998:3).
The 1989 conference at Ibadan is an illustration of how
Bassey, in spite of his deep felt resentment of colonialism, was able
to differentiate between what he saw as the evils of the system, and his
personal relations with those that he came to trust from that detested
colonial background. This does not mean that Bassey was not often suspicious
even of such friends, and sometimes irascible, but he appeared able to
forgive and forget. This can be further illustrated by two examples. In
the first case, Bassey was a difficult person to edit and publish; often
his book contributions were much too long, somewhat rambling away from
the main theme of the book, and poorly referenced with regard both to
accuracy and (because of the absence of adequate library holdings in Nigeria)
to coverage of recent publications. But it was not to the rather fierce
editing and ferocious reduction in length of his 1995 chapter on “European
Encumbrances to the Development of Relevant Theory in African Archaeology”
described by one of us (KM) as one of Andah’s most important essays to
which Bassey objected, but rather to the somewhat meek and mild remarks
(Ucko 1995:xx, 3) wherein the Volume Editor (PU) thanked the Series Editor
for showing how to include Bassey Andah’s chapter in the book, although
“it did not appear to be aware of much recent theoretical writing”; and
to the statement that “nothing [resulting from colonialism] is perhaps
as inevitable as Andah suggests”. After one splenetic letter from Bassey
to PU, all was forgotten in ongoing close association and friendship.
In the second case, Bassey’s never failing devotion to
archaeology, and to the University of Ibadan, as well as his pride in
being a Nigerian, was sorely tested. For several years he had been made
aware that TS planned that his library of archaeological books and offprints
should go to Ibadan, and Bassey watched carefully as the library’s owner
moved into a smaller dwelling where it could not be housed. The WAC offered
to subvent the costs of storing the library, to prevent its being dispersed.
It was not to the delay that Bassey objected but to the eventual decision,
following discussion between him and Thurstan Shaw in 1993, that libraries
were no longer safe in Nigeria and that the library would be more usefully
and securely housed within the London Institute of Archaeology. Critical
and disappointed though he was at this outcome, nothing would ever really
disturb his feelings for his first Head of Department. Others could be
less lucky, their published views, modes of examination, or careless utterances
being treated as colonial insult, resulting in personal distancing.
Bassey’s 1995 chapter concerning archaeological theory
was a more refined expression of his radical agenda of the mid-1980s,
couched in terms not alien to the discourses of multivocality and power
present in the post-processual archaeology of the time (e.g. Hodder 1991).
Additionally, it contained a powerful advocacy of what has been termed
more broadly in archaeology the “direct historical approach”: the notion
that the most important analogues for behaviour at an archaeological site
can be found in the living peoples in the same region. To the end, he
stressed that African archaeology must:
become a historical science that distances itself from
the present discipline, which studies illusory entities and reduces human
beings to mere chessboard pieces, as if they were part of an organic world
totally under the control of the physical and mathematical laws of Science
and Nature. It has to be an archaeology firmly founded on the fact that
historical, not mathematical or any other scientific awareness, is the
only form of self-knowledge.(Andah 1995:107)
In essence Bassey stated that to understand the African
past, expatriate archaeologists had to be as much students of African
cultures as teachers of archaeology. Furthermore, the particularistic
complexity inherent in the African past must not be subject to abstract models or evolutionary schemes supplied from external
sources, but rather investigated via close cooperation between archaeological,
oral historical and other anthropological approaches. In this final reasoned
appeal to archaeology, Bassey found an approach in harmony both with current
developments in world archaeology and with his own passionate conscience.
To return to the WAC, less well known than Bassey’s televised
anti-apartheid role in 1986, or his magnificent contribution there at
the Plenary Session, or his selection to serve on the WAC Steering Committee
during 1986/87, was the ongoing importance of his contribution to this
world organization. So, for example, at the WAC2 in 1990 in Venezuela
he was urging Council to strengthen African effectiveness within the organization
by establishing two African coordinating centres, one in the East, one
in the West, and promising that a strong African membership of the WAC
would be built up. But where Bassey’s voice was crucially important was
in discussions leading to the continuing ban on South African membership
of Council. At that same meeting, he seconded the motion to accept Namibia
as a Council member, and he also argued in favour of a policy of allowing
any individual South Africans who received approval from South Africa’s
Mass Democratic Movement to be observers of Council and participants in
WAC academic discussion sessions, provided that it was clearly understood
that they were not in any way representing the country of South Africa.
The importance of his interventions in these debates no doubt contributed
to his being appointed in 1990 by the WAC Council to be their representative
on the WAC Charity Directorship.
In the January 1993 WAC Inter-Congress meeting in Kenya,
Bassey was one of the five-strong monitoring group which recommended to
the WAC Executive that South Africa should henceforth be allowed to join
the WAC Council’s Electoral College. But Bassey was at least as important
an influence in a very different role at that Inter-Congress meeting,
taking the considered lead in expressing his extreme suspicion of the
motives, sentiments and recommendations being proposed to WAC from the
US Development Agency Forest Service with regard to funding archaeology
and cultural heritage management and “the requirement to make the deployment
of high technologies routine in such work”. Bassey spent much of his time
warning participants in the Inter-Congress from other developing nations
of the dangers of what he identified in this and other cases as being
simply a new kind of colonialism designed to facilitate access to Africa
by European countries and America, with resultant detrimental dependence
on high technological equipment and training.
By the time of WAC 3 in 1994 in Delhi, Bassey was ready
to take on the role of President of the organization. In the context of
what has been described by one of us (PU) as a meeting “marred by administrative
problems within an overly politically fraught atmosphere” (Ucko and Layton
1999:xxv), there was really only one individual who could have restored
the confidence of WAC in those participants in WAC 3 who had been drawn
into the internal fire of Indian archaeological politics. At this Congress,
Bassey’s deeply-held Christian ethic was clear for all to see as he effortlessly
chaired his first, complicated and contentious, WAC Council and Executive
meetings. He was equally determined to be an effective President, it having
been a condition of his accepting that Presidency that the existing WAC
office in Ibadan be upgraded with phone, fax and email linkages.
In the event, of course, Bassey was forced to all intents
and purposes to be inactive in international affairs for the next two
years because of the worsening situation in Nigeria. During that time
he had apparently decided he could do more good for those Nigerians about
whom he cared so much by moving on to a senior university administrative
position. He was not successful in his attempt to move back to Calabar
as that university’s Vice-Chancellor, and during early 1997 he was embroiled
in problems regarding his expected appointment as Deputy Vice-Chancellor
(Administration) in the University of Ibadan. Nevertheless, he was able
to attend a WAC meeting in the UK, when he appeared bursting with energy
and ideas for a future WAC Inter-Congress on the “Archaeological Evidence
for Slavery”, as well as for the already scheduled Inter-Congress meeting
on the “Destruction of Cultural Property” (resulting from the aborted
discussions of WAC 3). After his return to Nigeria, he again became uncontactable,
at least from outside Nigeria.
Rumours first reported that he had at last been appointed
Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Ibadan in March 1997, and subsequently that
he was ill, first in Ibadan, and then in Lagos. On 15 December Bassey’s
apologies were presented to the London meeting of the WAC Charity Directors.
The Directors agreed to pay for him to come to London for medical tests.
He died in Lagos on 22 December 1997, at the age of 56.
As his wife Louisa wrote:
What do I say to you? Yes, Bassey is truly gone and his passage is so painful
and so permanent ... I thank God for the way He affected humanity through
Bassey’s life and works.
Afterword
The foregoing is a slightly revised, and referenced, version of the Memorial
Lecture, read by Thurstan Shaw, presented on video at the World Archaeological
Congress 4 held in Cape Town on 12 January 1999, and shown again at the
University of Ibadan on 27 January 1999.
In the video Professor Shaw first gave a word of explanation
about the lecture having been composed jointly by himself, Professor Peter
Ucko and Dr Kevin MacDonald. He then explained that when the invitation
came from Ibadan to do this lecture, they all desired to pay tribute to
Bassey Andah both as the man they had known and as the outstanding African
archaeologist of the continent. However they wanted the lecture to have
some unity, and accordingly their separate contributions are not distinguished,
and the whole, on which they all collaborated, was read by one person,
TS.
He explained that their willingness to present this lecture
was not only an expression of their admiration for Bassey Andah, it was
also an expression of their faith in Nigeria and Nigerian scholars in
spite of the tremendous difficulties and obstacles they have been encountering.
European scholars are fortunate that it is difficult for them to imagine
the extent of these obstacles and discouragements, but the authors believe
that the persistence and determination of Nigerian scholars, so outstandingly
demonstrated by Bassey Andah, will prevail in the long term.
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