Late Mallam Liman Chiroma Potiskum (1930-2004).
Nigeria’s first Archaeologist

Late Mallam Liman Chiroma Potiskum (1930-2004)..
Nigeria’s first Archaeologist , And former Head of Service of the Military Government in 1970s .

Liman Ciroma became Nigeria’s first archaeologist in 1955.

From 1977 to 1979 Liman Ciroma was head of Nigeria’s civil service and secretary to its then military government. At the education ministry in the early 1970s he had been instrumental in the expansion of the Nigerian university system.

But Liman was also his country’s first qualified archaeologist and never lost his interest in preserving its rich heritage.
As a sixth-former at northern Nigeria’s top boys’ school, Kaduna College, Liman had heard a talk by Bernard Fagg, then assistant surveyor of antiquities for the colonial government. Fagg had asked for volunteers to train to locate and save the country’s history. Liman stepped forward.

He became a great friend of Fagg and his family and worked with him from 1949 until 1953, during the building of Nigeria’s first museum at Jos in central Nigeria, where open cast tin mining was uncovering archaeological material, including the famous Nok figures. At Ile-Ife, in the south, their work included the restoration of the granite monolith the Opa Oranyan, one of Nigeria’s scheduled ancient monuments.

From 1953 to 1959 a government scholarship took Liman to study archaeology and history at London University’s Institute of Archaeology, at the South-West Essex Technical College and at Birmingham University, where he became the first Nigerian with an archaeology honours degree.

He then became an archaeologist in Nigeria’s federal department of antiquities, working throughout the country and acting as deputy to British archaeologist Thurstan Shaw on the excavation of Igbo-Ukwu.
Liman was born a member of the royal family of Fika, during the period of British administration.

Fika is a small emirate in the hot, dry north of Nigeria, east of the great Hausa-Fulani emirate of Kano and west of the Kanuri emirate of Bornu. He spent most of his adult life away from Fika, but in 1993 he was turbanned as Ciroma, second to the Emir in rank.
He went to school in his home town, Potiskum, then to Borno Middle School in Maiduguri and finally to Kaduna College.

The north of Nigeria was – and remains – short of people trained in western technologies and skills. Post-independence it was almost inevitable that Liman, by 1961 acting deputy director of antiquities, would be lured into administration.

In 1961, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Northern Region’s premier, headhunted him for a senior post in the region’s local government ministry. By 1968, he was in Lagos as permanent secretary in the federal ministry of industries.
In an increasingly bombastic and often corrupt society, Liman retained the honesty, plain speaking and common sense that had made him a good administrator in both the British and the northern Nigerian traditions.

He and his wife Madiya had five children. In retirement they lived in Kaduna, the former northern capital where he had started his administrative career. He loved his garden with its fruit trees – and could often be found there playing with his grandchildren.

He was a devout Muslim, who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, but had many Christian friends, and viewed the polarisation of the two religions in Nigeria with concern. Courteous, considerate and generous, a fine public servant, he is survived by his wife and children.
· Alhaji Adamu Liman Ciroma, archaeologist and administrator, born September 30 1930; died May 23 2004.

May his Soul rest in Peace