Alan Cowell

His family reported his death and said it occurred as he was on his way back to Zimbabwe from India, where he had been treated for an unspecified liver ailment.

Such was Dabengwa’s feared reputation among the white minority of Zimbabwe, the former Rhodesia, that he earned the sobriquet “the Black Russian,” because of his close ties to the Soviet Union, where he underwent training by the KGB in the 1960s.

Yet, when the seven-year bush war ended shortly before independence in 1980, he played a persuasive role in trying to unite the rival guerrilla armies that had fought white minority rule: his own Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, or ZIPRA, which was loyal to Joshua Nkomo; and the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, of ZANLA, which fought in the name of Robert Mugabe. Mugabe would go on to rule Zimbabwe, ever more autocratically, for more than three decades, until he was deposed in a military coup in 2017.

A photograph from the independence era showed the bearded Dabengwa in military camouflage fatigues alongside Rex Nhongo, the nom de guerre of Solomon Mujuru, the ranking ZANLA commander, as the two rivals joined with their former white adversaries in the effort to create a unified national army.

When fighting between their two armies broke out in late 1980, claiming some 60 lives, the two men traveled together to the township of Entumbane in southwestern Zimbabwe to pry the combatants apart.

But the gesture was not enough to prevent a further conflagration in February 1981, when some 300 former guerrillas were killed in Entumbane, in an uprising that Mugabe put down by deploying white-led military units that had once fought to resist majority rule.

Bloody though the fighting had been, it was little more than a prelude to far more widespread violence when Mugabe ordered his North Korean-trained 5th Brigade to sweep through Matabeleland — the Ndebele heartland in southwestern Zimbabwe — ostensibly to seek out so-called dissidents loyal to Nkomo. Thousands of people died in massacres that have stained the country’s collective memory to this day.

At the time of the killings, Mugabe’s intelligence chief was Emmerson Mnangagwa, the same person who emerged from the 2017 coup as Zimbabwe’s president and who offered a glowing eulogy to Dabengwa after his death. On Sunday, the authorities in Harare, the capital, declared Dabengwa a national hero.

The patterns of intolerance under Mugabe had emerged early. Much of the animosity lay in the enduring distinctions between the majority Shona people, who supported Mugabe, and the minority Ndebele people, who backed Nkomo.

Dabengwa’s experiences offered a template for the blend of repression, cunning and co-option that enabled Mugabe to hold power for so long.

Three years into independence, Dabengwa and ZIPRA’s military commander, Lt. Gen. Lookout Masuku, were tried on treason charges after the discovery of what the authorities said was an arms cache. Dabengwa was also charged with seeking to maintain close ties to the KGB.

When he and Masuku were acquitted, they were immediately rearrested under emergency powers dating to the era of white minority rule.

Masuku died in 1986 shortly after his transfer to a hospital from prison, and Dabengwa was freed under an uneven unity agreement between Mugabe and Nkomo in 1987.

Dabengwa went on to serve as home affairs minister from 1992 to 2000. But in 2008 he withdrew from the unity pact to revive the party that was once led by Nkomo, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, or ZAPU.

For all he had fought for independence, Dabengwa’s spell as an official in Mugabe’s government earned him a place on the list of Zimbabwean leaders subject to United States economic sanctions, accused of undermining Zimbabwe’s democracy.

To the end, he remained unforgiving toward Mugabe, insisting that the government formally accept responsibility for the Matabeleland slaughter in the 1980s, apologize to relatives of the victims and compensate them for their losses.

“Until this matter is resolved” he told Michael Holman, a visiting British journalist, in 2018, “Zimbabwe will be a divided country.”

Dumiso Dabengwa was born on Dec. 6, 1939, the son of Mahliki and Mavakatsha Dabengwa. With his wife, Zodwa Khumalo, his children included a daughter Ijeoma, who was also listed by the U.S. Treasury as subject to sanctions. The official ZAPU website said the couple had two children, but news reports put the figure at five.

Dabengwa was educated at local schools and went on to work for the city council in Bulawayo, the main city in Matabeleland, and at a branch of Barclays Bank there. At a time when resentment of colonial inequities was building across Africa, he once complained that less qualified white employees at the bank earned twice the amount he did for doing less work.

His active opposition to minority rule dated to the late 1950s, when he led other Zimbabweans in a campaign of civil resistance that earned him a spell in prison. His role as an underground activist and saboteur led him to Moscow in the early 1960s for training as he sought to build what he called “the vanguard of a guerrilla army” to fight white minority rule.

At that time, superpower rivalries between East and West meant that “we were used as pawns in Africa’s entire decolonization process,” Dabengwa wrote in a paper in 2015. A rift between the Soviet Union and China meant that some liberation movements, including ZAPU and Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, won Moscow’s backing while others, including Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union, or ZANU, were supported mainly by China.

Dabengwa returned to newly independent Zambia, Zimbabwe’s northern neighbor, in late 1964. Zambia, like other so-called front-line states, played a central role in offering rear bases to guerrilla fighters from across the region.

In the late 1960s, indeed, joint units from Dabengwa’s ZIPRA and the African National Congress’ military wing sought to infiltrate what was then called Rhodesia by crossing the Zambezi River and fighting some of the earliest battles for independence. The war intensified from 1972 onward, with the rival guerrilla armies fighting in separate areas, from separate rear-bases and with separate command structures and strategies.

While Mugabe’s guerrillas fought a largely rural campaign modeled on Maoist principles, ZIPRA planned to set up semiliberated zones from which to “eventually liberate and occupy the major cities of the country,” Dabengwa wrote.

In 1979, however, talks at Lancaster House in London produced a peace deal that ended the bush war, though not the animosities that it had spawned between the rival claimants to the spoils of victory. When Zimbabwe held elections in 2018, Dabengwa pointedly supported those who opposed Mugabe’s successor.

This article originally appeared in <a id="1df4f0a4-3916-365a-a8ca-d7b611400062" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/obituaries/dumiso-dabengwa-dead.html">The New York Times</a>.

Dumiso Dabengwa, a force in Zimbabwe's liberation, is dead at 79

Dumiso Dabengwa, a Moscow-trained intelligence supremo and insurgent leader in Zimbabwe’s liberation war, whose fortunes tracked Cold War rivalries and the political and ethnic score-settling that followed independence from Britain, died on Thursday in Kenya. He was 79.

His death, at the Royal Marsden Hospital, was confirmed by Jon Oakley, a partner at Simkins, a law firm that represents the Finney family. The cause was a chest infection, he said.

Finney became one of his generation’s finest and most honored actors over six decades. A frequent nominee for an Oscar and Britain’s equivalent of one, the BAFTA, he was a star as comfortable in movies like “Tom Jones,” “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Under the Volcano” and “Erin Brockovich” as he was on the classical British stage.

He first came to wide attention alongside contemporaries like Alan Bates and Tom Courtenay, actors collectively known as “angry young men” — counterparts to the playwrights and novelists who shared that sobriquet. Together they helped turn Britain’s gaze inward, toward gritty industrial landscapes, where a generation of disaffected youth railed against the class system and the claustrophobic trap it laid for workers locked in dead-end jobs.

Finney was propelled to early stardom by “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” a low-budget 1960 film steeped in smoggy vistas of smokestacks and deprivation and shot in stark black and white. Finney played Arthur Seaton, a restless young man caught in sexual adventures and bouts of beer drinking intended to distract him from his job at a cavernous bicycle factory.

His broad-voweled northern accent injected a powerful authenticity into the part, and his acting style drew favorable comparisons to such titans of the English stage as Laurence Olivier. Yet he preferred wealth to accolades, according to his biographer, Quentin Falk.

“At the turn of the ‘60s, Finney was the screen’s incarnation of the new working-class hero,” Falk wrote in “Albert Finney in Character,” published in 1992 and republished in 2015. “In the theater, he was barely 20 when he was hailed as the ‘new Olivier.’ Yet instead of pursuing either mantle, he became a millionaire and made love to beautiful women on several continents.”

Falk added: “To some he is still the leading actor of his generation; to others, though, he has suffered an ambition bypass. To even severer critics, he appears to have remained cheerfully indolent, almost willfully failing to fulfill the remarkable early promise.”

The angry young men “were indignant because little seemed to be changing in postwar Britain,” critic and essayist Nora Sayre wrote in The New York Times in 2000. “They thought there were few opportunities for the young.”

Their characters grew from the work of novelists like Alan Sillitoe (who adapted his novel in writing the script of “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning”), John Braine and David Storey, and the playwright John Osborne, whose “Look Back in Anger” set the parameters for what became known as kitchen-sink dramas in the late 1950s and ‘60s.

“Stocky and obdurate, Mr. Finney spits with aggression, walks with impatience and indicates that laws exist to be broken,” Sayre wrote. “His morose, craggy face looks as though it has been pummeled by experience.”

The angry young men were a prelude to the explosion of creativity and license that characterized the Swinging Sixties, when the songs of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other bands were anthems to a new permissiveness that changed British society.

Finney went on to play an eclectic array of movie roles, from the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in Sidney Lumet’s star-studded version of Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express” in 1975, to the pugnacious lawyer Edward L. Masry, who hires the crusading title character (Julia Roberts) in “Erin Brockovich” (2000), Steven Soderbergh’s tale of a power company pollution scandal.

But in 2007, Finney dropped out of sight, disclosing only in 2011 that he had been struggling for four years with cancer. After his return to acting, he took small parts in the thriller “The Bourne Legacy” and the James Bond movie “Skyfall,” both in 2012.

“The pattern of my life is that there is no pattern,” Finney once said. “In work I like doing things that are different, contrasting. I’m lurching rather than pointing in any given direction.”

An episode in 1960 seemed to confirm that self-assessment. Finney had a long screen test for the lead role in David Lean’s epic movie “Lawrence of Arabia,” but, according to Falk, he rejected a lucrative five-year contract with the film’s producer, Sam Spiegel, saying, “I didn’t know where I want to be in five years’ time — or tomorrow for that matter.”

The role, of the adventurer T.E. Lawrence, went to Peter O’Toole and turned him into an international star.

Finney was nominated five times for an Oscar, four for best actor: as the title character in “Tom Jones,” Tony Richardson’s 1963 adaptation of the Henry Fielding novel; as Poirot in “Murder on the Orient Express”; as an aging, embittered actor in Peter Yates’ 1983 version of “The Dresser”; and as an alcoholic British consul in a small town in Mexico in John Huston’s “Under the Volcano,” based on the Malcolm Lowry novel. His performance in “Erin Brockovich” earned him a supporting actor nomination.

He was also nominated 13 times for a BAFTA and won twice — as “most promising newcomer” in 1960 and, in 2002, for his performance as Winston Churchill in “The Gathering Storm,” a BBC-HBO television movie that also brought him an Emmy.

He never won an Oscar, however, and made a point of not attending the glittering award ceremonies.

“It’s a very long evening and not exactly my idea of a good night out,” Falk quoted him as saying — “sat there for five hours in a nonsmoking, nondrinking environment.”

During the Oscar ceremony in 1963, Finney was cruising aboard a luxurious catamaran off Hawaii while a news crew, surrounded by a throng of onlookers, awaited his return to port in case he won the award for his role in “Tom Jones.”

From an upper deck, Finney had a clear view onto the approaching quay side. “Suddenly,” Falk wrote, “Finney saw a man pushing his way through the crowd, shouting: ‘Wrap it up. He didn’t win.’ Sidney Poitier had.” (Poitier won for “Lilies of the Field.”)

By the time the catamaran docked, the news crew and its equipment had disappeared.

Finney’s aversion to such accolades extended even to Britain’s own system of medals, knighthoods and peerages. In 2000, he turned down an opportunity to become Sir Albert Finney, echoing an earlier rejection of a lesser award. He said the honors system was a way of “perpetuating snobbery.”

Albert Finney was born on May 9, 1936, in Salford, near Manchester in northwest England, the third child and first son of Alice Hobson, who left school at age 14 to work in a mill, and Albert Finney Sr., who made his living running bets on horse racing.

The family lived at first in a rowhouse — the familiar cramped accommodation of the working classes in a region where the Industrial Revolution had spread a patina of grime, grit and pollution over back-to-back homes separated by cobbled alleyways and streets. Overshadowed by the nearby northern metropolis of Manchester, Salford was known as a factory town and inland port, and its docklands became a target for German bombers during World War II.

In 1941, when Finney was 5 years old, the family was bombed out of its rowhouse and moved to a more genteel home across town.

“Though Finney himself would later come to personify the working-class hero in several of his earliest roles,” Falk wrote, the move to a new area “confirmed a strictly lower-middle-class status for a family who were never really less than comfortably off.”

As a high school student at Salford Grammar School, Finney displayed both a liking for the theater and a poor grasp of academic subjects. A teacher suggested that he apply to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art — Britain’s premier acting school, usually known as RADA — where he auditioned in 1953 and won a scholarship.

By 20, he had completed his course at RADA and was playing parts in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” at a repertory theater in Birmingham, in the English Midlands. He went on to play Henry V in the play of the same name — one of many Shakespearean roles that established his reputation on the stage.

Besides Shakespeare, he had leading roles in plays by Anton Chekhov, Samuel Beckett, August Strindberg and John Osborne.

Finney met Jane Wenham, a fellow actor, in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1957. The couple married and had a son, Simon, who became a film technician. They divorced in 1961. Finney married the French actress Anouk Aimée in 1970. They divorced in 1978. He married Pene Delmage, a travel specialist, in 2006.

He is survived by his wife, his son and two grandchildren.

The low-budget “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” filmed on location in Nottingham and at Twickenham Studios, was Finney’s big break. Three years later, the critical and box-office success of “Tom Jones,” which won three Oscars, including best picture, made him a millionaire at the age of 27. He took a 10-month break to travel the world for much of 1964.

As Finney’s career unfolded, movies overlapped with stage plays. He appeared in the musical films “Scrooge” in 1970 and “Annie” in 1982, for which he shaved his head to play Daddy Warbucks. He made his American television debut in the role of Pope John Paul II in 1984.

“I often wondered why I am an actor,” Finney told a television interviewer in 1962. He then seemed to answer the question, speaking of the profession as a very public form of escape.

“I think I am always watching and balancing, and sort of tabulating my own emotions,” he said. “And the only way I can lose myself is when I’m acting.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/movies/albert-finney-dead.html" id="21d13ca0-426c-38cd-a90f-c8b6787fc68c">The New York Times</a>.

LONDON — Albert Finney, the British stage and film actor who defined an era’s rage and frustration in dramas of blue-collar realism and social revolt and went on to find stardom in Hollywood, died Thursday in London. He was 82.

Albert Finney, 'Angry Young Man' Who Became a Hollywood Star, Dies at 82

The angry young men “were indignant because little seemed to be changing in postwar Britain,” critic and essayist Nora Sayre wrote in The New York Times in 2000. She added, “They thought there were few opportunities for the young.”

The angry young men were a prelude to the explosion of creativity and license that characterized the swinging Sixties, when the songs of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other bands were anthems to a new permissiveness that changed British society.

Finney was nominated five times for an Oscar, four for best actor: as the title character in “Tom Jones,” Tony Richardson’s 1963 adaptation of the Henry Fielding novel; as Poirot in “Murder on the Orient Express”; as an aging, embittered actor in Peter Yates’ 1983 version of “The Dresser”; and as an alcoholic British consul in a small town in Mexico in John Huston’s “Under the Volcano,” based on the Malcolm Lowry novel. His performance in “Erin Brockovich” earned him a best-supporting actor nomination.

During the Oscars ceremony in 1963, Finney was cruising aboard a luxurious catamaran off Hawaii while a news crew, surrounded by a throng of onlookers, awaited his return to port in case he won the award for his role in “Tom Jones.”

From an upper deck, Finney had a clear view onto the approaching quay side. “Suddenly,” Falk wrote, “Finney saw a man pushing his way through the crowd, shouting: ‘Wrap it up. He didn’t win.’ Sidney Poitier had.” (Poitier won for “Lillies of the Field.”)

The low-budget “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” filmed on location in Nottingham and at Twickenham Studios, was Finney’s big break. Three years later, the critical and box-office success of “Tom Jones,” which won three Oscars, including best picture, made him a millionaire at the age of 27, according to Falk. He took a 10-month break to travel the world for much of 1964.

As Finney’s career unfolded, movies overlapped with stage plays and musical films, including “Scrooge” in 1970 and “Annie” in 1982, when Finney shaved his head to play the part of Daddy Warbucks. He made his American television debut with a biopic in 1984 in which he played Pope John Paul II.

“I often wondered why I am an actor,” Finney told a television interviewer in 1962. He then seemed to answer the question, speaking of the profession as a very public form of escape. “I think I am always watching and balancing, and sort of tabulating my own emotions,” he said. “And the only way I can lose myself is when I’m acting.”

Finney became one of his generation’s finest and most honored actors over six decades, a frequent nominee for an Oscar and Britain’s equivalent of one, the BAFTA; a star as comfortable in movies like “Tom Jones,” “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Under the Volcano” and “Erin Brockovich” as he was on the classical British stage.

Finney was propelled to early stardom by “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” a low-budget 1960 film steeped in smoggy vistas of smokestacks and deprivation and shot in stark black and white. Finney played Arthur Seaton, a restless young man caught in sexual adventures and bouts of beer-drinking that are supposed to distract him from his job at a cavernous bicycle factory.

“At the turn of the Sixties, Finney was the screen’s incarnation of the new working-class hero,” Falk wrote in “Albert Finney in Character,” published in 1992 and republished in 2015. “In the theater, he was barely 20 when he was hailed as the ‘new Olivier.’ Yet instead of pursuing either mantle, he became a millionaire and made love to beautiful women on several continents.”

The angry young men “were indignant because little seemed to be changing in postwar Britain,” author Nora Sayre wrote in The New York Times in 2000. She added, “They thought there were few opportunities for the young.”

Their characters grew from the work of novelists like Alan Sillitoe (who adapted his novel in writing the script of “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning”), John Braine and David Storey, and the playwright John Osborne, whose “Look Back in Anger” set the parameters for what became known as kitchen-sink dramas of the late 1950s and 1960s.

An episode in 1960 seemed to confirm that self-assessment. Finney had a long screen test for the lead role in David Lean's epic movie “Lawrence of Arabia,” but, according to Falk, he rejected a lucrative five-year contract with the film’s producer, Sam Spiegel, saying, “I didn’t know where I want to be in five years’ time — or tomorrow for that matter.”

The role, of the adventurer T.E. Lawrence, went to Peter O'Toole and turned him into an international star.

He was also nominated 13 times for a BAFTA and won twice — as “most promising newcomer” in 1960 and, in 2002, as Winston Churchill in “The Gathering Storm,” a BBC-HBO television movie that also brought him a best-actor Emmy.

“It’s a very long evening and not exactly my idea of a good night out,” Falk quoted him as saying — “sat there for five fours in a nonsmoking, non-drinking environment.”

Albert Finney was born on May 9, 1936, in Salford, near Manchester in northwest England, the third child and first son of Alice Hobson, who left school at age 14 to work in a mill, and Albert Finney Sr., who made his living as a turf accountant, or “bookie,” running bets on horse-racing.

As a high school student at Salford Grammar School, Finney displayed both a liking for the theater and a poor grasp of academic subjects. A teacher suggested that he apply to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts — Britain’s premier acting school, usually known as RADA — where he auditioned in 1953 and won a scholarship.

Finney met Jane Wenham, a fellow actor, in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1957. The couple married and had a son, Simon (who became a film technician). They divorced in 1961. Finney married the French actress Anouk Aimée in 1970. They divorced in 1978. He married Pene Delmage, a travel specialist, in 2006.

“I often wondered why I am an actor,” Finney told a television interviewer in 1962, then seemed to answer the question, speaking of the profession as a very public form of escape. “I think I am always watching and balancing, and sort of tabulating my own emotions,” he said. “And the only way I can lose myself is when I’m acting.”

LONDON — Albert Finney, the British stage and film actor who defined an era’s rage and frustration in dramas of blue-collar realism and social revolt and who went on to find stardom in Hollywood, died Thursday in London. He was 82.

Shagari died at the National Hospital after a brief illness, his grandson Bello Shagari said on Twitter.

It was a token of Nigeria’s long tug-of-war between the barracks and the ballot box that President Muhammadu Buhari — who, as an army general, removed Shagari from power in 1983 — returned to office in the 2015 elections. It was the first peaceful transfer of power between civilians of different political parties since Nigeria’s independence from Britain in 1960.

By then, Shagari, patrician and mild-mannered, had become what his followers called an elder statesman as his country grappled with challenges that had become familiar: an almost reflexive recourse to graft; an economic malaise relating to falling prices of oil, Nigeria’s dominant foreign-currency earner; and a fierce divide between its northern Muslims and southern Christians that became ever more stark with the rise of a bloodthirsty jihadi movement called Boko Haram.

On his 90th birthday in 2015, President Goodluck Jonathan and five previous presidents came to visit him, Nigerian news reports said.

“I mourn the departure of a patriot, who served Nigeria with humility, integrity and diligence,” Buhari said Saturday on Twitter.

Shagari was president for just over four years, winning two elections, both of them disputed by his opponents. He was criticized by his adversaries for his meekness in governing Nigeria, sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous nation. Indeed, with his scholarly manners, the undemonstrative Shagari, a former schoolteacher raised as a devout Sunni Muslim, sometimes seemed an unlikely figurehead for a nation that projected itself as Africa’s colossus.

He was the first civilian leader to take office under a constitution modeled on that of the United States, with an executive president, a bicameral legislature and significant powers given to the governors of the country’s 19 federal states.

While most post-independence rulers were high-ranking soldiers bent on enforcing their will with scant regard for consensus-building, Shagari, in his flowing Islamic robes and distinctive beaded headgear, described himself as a conciliator who operated above the daily joust of Nigeria’s politics.

But he could not remain aloof from a global glut in oil that sent prices tumbling in the early 1980s, just as the people who had voted him into power were expecting better lives. In 1983, as economic troubles seized the land, he presided over one of his country’s most dramatic peacetime upheavals, ordering the expulsion of foreigners who had been drawn to Nigeria by its oil wealth.

Up to 2 million people, many of them Ghanaians, fled the country in what was seen as one of modern Africa’s biggest population shifts.

It was not the only sign of turmoil. In northern cities such as Kano and Maiduguri, followers of an Islamic cult rampaged for three successive years, sacking churches, attacking religious rivals and threatening authorities’ ability to deal with sectarian passions.

In October 1982, Shagari was criticized by his foes for granting amnesty to 1,000 members of the Maitatsine cult — sometimes depicted as the forerunner of Boko Haram — who had been imprisoned since 1980. A month later, a fresh convulsion of violence killed hundreds of people and challenged the government to restore calm without calling on the military, an action that would have been seen as a tacit acknowledgment of civilian failure.

It was on Shagari’s watch, too, that the authorities made it a priority to proceed with the construction of a new capital in Abuja to escape the chaos and tribal affiliations of Lagos, which remained the commercial heart of the country.

In theory, the location and design of the new capital were emblems of unity among the dominant ethnic groups, lying roughly equidistant from the Yoruba heartland in the southwest, Ibo strongholds in the east and the largely Hausa Fulani north. The grand project, however, was slowed by the economic crisis and became a byword for lucrative construction contracts.

When Shagari was re-elected for a brief second term in August 1983, shortly before his ouster on Dec. 31, Pat Utomi, a political scientist and commentator, remarked: “Nigerians see Shagari as a nice man, a gentle man, but not as a particularly strong man.”

Shehu Usman Aliyu Shagari was born Feb. 25, 1925, in a thatch-roofed house built of sunbaked clay in the village of Shagari, founded by his forebears near the city of Sokoto, according to “President and Power in Nigeria” (1982), a biography by British journalist David Williams. Sokoto, in northwest Nigeria, sits on a broad, arid savanna.

In later years, the honorific Alhaji was added to his name to denote his participation in the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, which began in 1960.

As permitted by Islamic law, Shagari was a polygamist, and he fathered numerous children. Nigerian news media said he had three wives, though Williams’ biography said he had four. Information about surviving family members was not immediately available. Shagari was the fifth child of Aliyu and Mariamu Shagari. His father was a farmer and a trader before he became the village’s headman.

Shagari studied at a Koranic school and an austere government boarding school before attending a teacher training college in Kaduna. He later returned to teach science at his old school in Sokoto.

He became active in local youth politics in his 20s and held ministerial posts in the governments that followed independence. But after the first military coup in 1966, he fled the capital to avoid arrest and returned to farm in Sokoto. He remained there during Nigeria’s civil war, which started in 1967, pitting government forces against eastern secessionists in the self-proclaimed state of Biafra.

After the secessionists’ surrender in 1970, the military leader, Gen. Yakubu Gowon, invited Shagari to Lagos to join the government as a minister of economic affairs.

Gowon was overthrown in a 1975 in a coup led by Brig. Murtala Muhammed. The next year, Muhammed was assassinated in a coup attempt and replaced as head of state by Gowon’s deputy, Brig. Olusegun Obasanjo. It was Obasanjo who presided over the preparations for the return to civilian rule in 1979, when Shagari stood as the candidate of the National Party of Nigeria and won by a narrow margin.

“Basically, he was a compromise candidate,” said Utomi, the political scientist. “He had no blemishes on him. He was not particularly ambitious. Power was thrust upon him.”

After the vote, Shagari’s adversaries challenged his victory, saying he had not secured the requisite electoral endorsement, but their complaint was rejected by Nigeria’s Supreme Court.

“The president has the whole nation as his constituency, and he should be above any petty differences between the various sections of the community,” Shagari told a news conference.

A year later, on his first visit overseas, he was feted in Washington by President Jimmy Carter, who told him that the United States shared Shagari's passion to end white minority rule in Africa. Zimbabwe, the former Rhodesia, had just achieved independence, but South Africa and Namibia remained under white rule.

In 1981, Shagari returned to the theme of liberation politics on a glittery state visit to London, where he told Queen Elizabeth II in a banquet speech that Nigerians expected Britain to combat “the horrible state of affairs” in apartheid-era South Africa.

But problems were piling up closer to home. The 1983 elections drew widespread allegations of fraud. Economic woes piled up. On New Year’s Eve, the army moved in again to seize power.

The reason for the coup, the iron-fisted Buhari said, was that his country had been “enslaved by a handful of people who had been sharing the wealth among themselves and who were determined to stay in office at any cost.”

Some high officials, notably Umaru Dikko, Shagari’s campaign manager, fled the country. But Shagari was arrested, along with hundreds of other officials.

Only in 1986 did a judge acquit him of corruption charges and order his release. And only in 1999, after a brief interlude of civilian rule in 1993, did Nigeria return to democratic rule, again under Obasanjo, who had by then assumed the mantle of a civilian politician.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/29/obituaries/shehu-shagari-dead.html" id="682047bf-45a0-3fa1-aa03-e59941a09833">The New York Times</a>.

Shehu Shagari, the former president of Nigeria who sought to revive democratic rule only to be deposed by military officers impatient with his seeming inability to confront endemic corruption and economic crisis, died Friday in Abuja, the capital. He was 93.

Shehu Shagari, Former Nigerian President, Dies at 93

It was a token of Nigeria’s long tug-of-war between the barracks and the ballot box that President Muhammadu Buhari — who, as an army general, removed Shagari from power in 1983 — returned to office in the 2015 elections, the first peaceful transfer of power between civilians of different political parties since Nigeria’s independence from Britain in 1960.

Shagari was president for just over four years, winning two elections, both of them disputed by his opponents. He was criticized by his adversaries for his meekness in governing sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous nation. Indeed, with his scholarly manners, the undemonstrative Shagari, a former schoolteacher raised as a devout Sunni Muslim, sometimes seemed an unlikely figurehead for a nation that projected itself as Africa’s colossus.

But he could not remain aloof from a global glut in oil that sent prices tumbling in the early 1980s, just as the people who voted him into power were expecting better lives. In 1983, as economic woes seized the land, he presided over one of his country’s most dramatic peacetime upheavals, ordering the expulsion of foreigners drawn to Nigeria by its oil wealth.

In October 1982, Shagari was criticized by his foes for granting amnesty to 1,000 members of the Maitatsine cult — sometimes depicted as the forerunner of Boko Haram — who had been imprisoned since 1980. A month later, a fresh convulsion of violence killed hundreds of people and challenged the government to restore calm without calling on the military, which would have been seen as a tacit acknowledgment of civilian failure.

In theory, the location and design of the new capital were emblems of unity among the dominant ethnic groups, roughly equidistant from the Yoruba heartland in the southwest, Ibo strongholds in the east and the largely Hausa Fulani north. The grand project, however, was slowed by the economic crisis and became a byword for lucrative construction contracts.

Shehu Usman Aliyu Shagari was born on Feb. 25, 1925, in a thatch-roofed house built of sunbaked clay in the village of Shagari, founded by his forebears near the city of Sokoto in northwest Nigeria, an area of broad, arid savanna, according to “President and Power in Nigeria” (1982), a biography by British journalist David Williams.

In later years, the honorific Alhaji was added to his name to denote his participation in the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca beginning in 1960.

As permitted by Islamic law, Shagari was a polygamist, and he fathered numerous children. Nigerian news media said he had three wives, though Williams’ biography said he had four. Information about Shagari’s surviving family members was not immediately available.

He was the fifth child of Aliyu Shagari, who was a farmer and a trader before he became the village’s headman, and his wife, Mariamu.

He studied at a Koranic school and an austere government boarding school before attending a teacher training college in Kaduna. He later returned to teach science at his old school in Sokoto.

He became active in local youth politics in his 20s and held ministerial posts in the governments that followed independence, until he fled the capital to avoid arrest after the first military coup in 1966. He returned to farm in Sokoto, where he lived during Nigeria’s bloody civil war, which started in 1967 and pitted government forces against eastern secessionists in the self-proclaimed state of Biafra.

Gowon was overthrown in a 1975 coup led by Brig. Murtala Muhammed, who was assassinated in a coup attempt the following year, replaced as head of state by Gowon’s deputy, Brig. Olusegun Obasanjo. It was Obasanjo who presided over the preparations for the return to civilian rule in 1979, when Shagari stood as the candidate of the National Party of Nigeria and won by a narrow margin.

After the vote, his adversaries challenged his victory, saying he had not secured the requisite electoral endorsement, but their complaint was rejected by the Supreme Court.

A year later, on his first visit overseas, Shagari was feted by President Jimmy Carter, who told him that the United States shared the Nigerian leader’s passion to end white minority rule in Africa. Zimbabwe, the former Rhodesia, had just achieved independence, but South Africa and Namibia remained under white rule.

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Alan Cowell

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