Bronze Igbo Ukwu pendant. Photo: Photo: Ukabia via Wikimedia Commons.
African tribe mourns Quaker archaeologist
African tribe mourns the death of their honorary chief
A West African tribe is mourning the death of a Cambridge professor and Quaker who was their honorary chief. Thurstan Shaw was a world expert on the archaeology of West Africa, whose research into the Igbo people of Nigeria led to them making him their Onu n’ekwulu ora – the voice that speaks for the people – in 1972.
His death, at the age of ninety-eight, has been widely mourned in Cambridge and among the academic community worldwide. His wife Pamela said: ‘He was very much loved by the Igbo people.’
During the 1950s, he helped to found the National Museum of Ghana, and was invited by the Nigerian government to carry out an archaeological dig at Igbo-Ukwu, an Igbo town.
In Igbo-Ukwu he unearthed a remarkable series of bronze artefacts. They dated back to the ninth century and were a revelation about the tribe’s ancient culture. The Igbo are mainly farmers, cultivating yams. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, many were shipped to the United States as slaves.
From 1963 to 1974, he was professor of archaeology at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. He returned to Cambridge to be director of studies in archaeology and anthropology at Magdalene College between 1976 and 1979.
Thurstan Shaw was a pacifist and a widely respected Quaker. He participated in the peaceful protest in Faslane in Scotland when he was in his nineties.
