Tree Pangolin, Manis tricuspis, also known as White-bellied or Three-cusped pangolin is the most available of the three Nigerian species of these scale-possessing anteaters in the southwest region where its medicinal purpose appears to be more important than its food value. Its Yoruba name, Akika, is apparently in reference to its most efficient defence mechanism,…
Christ Church Cathedral is an Anglican Church building, located at the interaction of Marina Street and Odunlami Street in Lagos Island. It dominates a very busy vehicle node (as opposed to a town square) and it overlooks a bustling harbor. Christ Church cathedral was designed and Began Benjamin, a Yoruba Sierra Leonean returnee, started the…
C.M.S. Grammar School is Nigeria’s first secondary school, established in June 1859 by Church Missionary Society, a Christian organization dedicated to the promotion of the faith. Herbert Macaulay’s father, Thomas Babington, as founder, had served as the school’s first principal. Primary schools in Lagos at this time were not up to ten. Expectedly, it was…
Ekundayo Phillips was a Musicologist and composer, renowned as a doyen of Nigerian church music. Ekundayo was born in 1884 to an Anglican priest, Rev. Charles Phillips. After his training at the CMS Grammar School in Lagos he went to London and trained as a pharmacist. While there, he studied piano, organ, and violin at…
Adeniji Adele became Oba of Lagos in 1949 but was not ceremonially installed till another three years. Musendiku Adeniji Adele was a well-travelled monarch. Before he ascended the throne, he was a surveyor and he worked for the Royal Engineers Service at Cameroon in 1915. Adeniji served at the treasury department and the National secretariat.…
Lagos Weekly Record was a newspaper started in 1890 by John Payne Jackson, published in Lagos every Saturday with an annual subscription of eighteen shillings. The paper survived its early years in part due to personal donations and became in time, not only the most commercially successful among its contemporaries, but also an arsenal of…
John Payne Jackson was one of the most colourful personalities in the Nigerian press, a journalist and philosopher, born on 25 March 1848 in Cape Palmas. He started the commercially successful Lagos Weekly Record in 1890 and was for the next twenty-five years one of the most outstanding journalists in the whole of West Africa,…
Nigeria National Democratic Party (NNDP), Nigeria’s first political party, founded by Herbert Macaulay in conjunction with Lagos intelligentsias such as Joseph Egerton Shyngle, Eric Moore, C.C. Adeniyi-Jones, and Dr. Adeyemo Alakija, in 1923 out of the need to contest elections into the new Legislative Council. The Nigeria National Democratic Party (NNDP) as a nationalist organization…
Action Group was the political organization founded by Obafemi Awolowo in 1950 following the dissolution of the Nigerian Youth Movement. In 1948, independent of his effort, Awolowo had realised that leaders like Adeyemo Alakija, Dr. Akinola Maja, Kofo Abayomi, Bode Thomas, Hezekiah Davies and Dr. Akanni Doherty have formed a pan-tribal group called Egbe Omo…
Thomas Horatio Jackson was the co-founder of the Nigerian National Democratic Party with Herbert Macaulay and one of the most colourful personalities in the history of the Nigerian press. Born in 1879, Horatio was a son of John Payne Jackson, one of the most important Lagos journalists of his time, whose editorial chair at the Lagos Weekly…