Category: History
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Traditional Aristocracy, the political system that trusts power with a limited ruling class in ancient times, existed side by sides with the royal institution and over the centuries, a balance of power between these two was somehow achieved in the region that would constitute the southwestern Nigeria. Hardly was there a monarch who successfully promoted…
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Sodeke was the founder of Abeokuta; the third Seriki of the Egba people who led them away from their several villages to the new place of relative safety. Sodeke was a king in every respect but in name. His happy reception of the British missionary, Henry Townsend, in 1843, is considered to be foresighted. He…
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Saro, a descriptive term apparently coined from “Sierra Leonean,” is a class of urbanized Yoruba former slaves that emerged in the nineteenth century following the 1807 British outlaw of slave trade. They were the ones, or children of those liberated by the British navy from slaving ships on the high seas. Many of these returnees…
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Thomas Birch Freeman was a Methodist minister and first preacher of the Christian gospel in Nigeria. Freeman was a mulatoo of black and English parentage, born in 1809 in Hampshire, England. He arrived in West Africa in 1838, a year after he was accepted as a Methodist missionary. At this time, some Saros who had…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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Nathaniel King was the first Nigerian to practice modern medicine in his own country. Nathaniel was born 14 July 1847 in Freetown to a Yoruba Clergyman, Rev.Thomas King, who together with Ajayi Crowther, translated several catechisms and portions of the Bible into Nigerian dialects. Nathaniel King returned with his missionary father to Abeokuta where he…
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Obafemi Awolowo was a statesman and philosopher, one of the principal founding fathers of Nigeria, revered like no other in southwest Nigeria politics. Awolowo was born 6 March 1909 in a small town, Ikenne, to Sopolu and Efunyela who were both early Christian converts. The death of his father in 1920 unsettled his life, but…