The political intervention of the British led to the emergence of the Nigerian state as we know it today; but even more relevant for our present purpose was the Christian Missionary proselytisation of Southern Nigeria, on the one hand, and the Islamic revival and revolution of the late 18th and 19th centuries on the other. In the case of the Christian missionary impact on Southern Nigeria, the society underwent considerable change, not only in beliefs but also in lifestyle and world-view. Christian missions provided Nigerians with the opportunity to acquire a Western education and a window through which to see other civilisations, but most of all, it led to the growth of educated, Western-oriented elite which would demand the application of all the basic tenets of liberalism in the conduct of Nigerian affairs. The missionary factor in modern Nigeria was first perceived in Yoruba and Efik and later in Igbo areas. The result of this gradual penetration was that the Western-educated elite emerged first in areas where the missionary impact had been greater and more sustained. By the early 1890s, there were Yoruba lawyers, doctors, and other Western-educated men, some of whom were indigenous Yoruba, others the children of repatriated slaves from the New World, particularly Brazil, and also from Sierra Leone.
The point to note is that by dint of an earlier Christian proselytisation, the Yoruba had a head start in the acquisition of Western education and all its consequences. Up to the 1920s, therefore, nationalist agitation for improvement of the African condition was led and completely dominated by the Yoruba and a few Efik, Izon (Ijo) and Itshekiri people. The Igbo did not become a factor in Nigerian nationalism until the arrival of Nnamdi Azikiwe in 1937 from America, where he had trained as a journalist and a political scientist. With his arrival in Nigeria and founding of his newspaper business, Azikiwe was able to fire the imagination of his people and mobilise them to catch up with the Yoruba with regard to Western education, but unlike most of the Yoruba, this goal was sometimes achieved by a community effort. Members of certain villages or clans usually collected money to send ambitious and brilliant young men to the United States or Britain in search of the “Golden Fleece”. This practice, which was widespread in the Eastern part of Nigeria, meant that when the young men returned to Nigeria after their studies, they would be obliged to return the favour of their people either by directly repaying the union that sent them, or by using their newly acquired status or position to somehow advance the cause of the clan or ethnic group. In a pluralist society such as Nigeria, this payment of an educational debt through favouritism and jobbery to one’s own ethnic group was to exacerbate inter-ethnic rivalry if not antagonism.
Most of the Yoruba student, by contrast, did not have to rely on his village or town to send him to London or New York because in many cases the parents concerned were involved in import-export trade or in the cocoa industry and were therefore able to pay the way of their children. Furthermore, with Lagos being the administrative and commercial capital of Nigeria, opportunities did exist for quick profit and subsequent capital accumulation by the indigenous entrepreneurs. Sometimes too, the missionary societies which had their headquarters in Yoruba land were able to aid students in their aspirations toward Western education without their having to rely on a communal financial levy.
The case of Northern Nigeria was different. While the Igbo people by the 1940s were trying to catch up with the Yoruba educationally, Northern Nigeria, for historical and religious reasons, continued to lag behind. With the revival of militant Islam and the founding of the Sokoto caliphate in the 19th century by Usman dan Fodiyo, his son, Sultan Mohammed Bello, and his brother, Abdullahi dan Fodiyo, Islam, which had been in a state of decline since the 15th century in Northern Nigeria, revived vigorously. The frontier of Islam continued to expand throughout the 19th century into the Yoruba country and even to Lagos. By the time of the advent of the British in Lagos in 1861, Islam was already a force to be reckoned with in Yoruba land, particularly among the Oyo, Egba, Ijebu, and what later became the Lagos colony areas.
Western education was associated with Christian evangelisation. Yet the British colonial regime in Nigeria was not particularly interested in spreading Western education anywhere in Nigeria. For administrative convenience, peace and security, the British under Lugard discouraged Christian evangelisation in the Muslim areas of Northern Nigeria. It is therefore understandable that Northern Nigeria lagged behind the rest of the country in terms of educational advancement. This regional disparity in education resulted in a different attitude towards colonialism by the various peoples in Nigeria. While the Yoruba and the Igbo were impatient and anxious to secure political autonomy as soon as possible, because they felt they were ready educationally, the Hausa-Fulani and Kanuri bided their time and did not want to be rushed into taking what they regarded as a leap in the dark. Western education, when it finally was allowed in the North, was officially funnelled through the so-called Nassarawa schools for the education of sons of Emirs and the Masu Sarauta in the science of administration and local government. Even when the Katsina College was to be elevated in 1930 to a higher status along the lines of the Yaba Higher College, the plan was dropped, ostensibly because of insufficiency of funds and to avoid duplication, but primarily because the British thought otherwise.
As a consequence, the Southern and Northern Nigerians were first educated together at the Yaba Higher College, despised by the nationalists because what they wanted was a full university. Lagos as a city was not particularly popular with the British who dissuaded Northerners from coming there.
Lagos in the 1930s was a sleepy old African city which the British colonial administrators were trying to upgrade to the status of a federal capital. Since the old city itself could not be developed, considerable amounts of money were spent on the outlying Ikoyi plains from 1920 onwards. It was in Ikoyi that the Britons lived, in what was the equivalent of the quartier blanc (white area) in French West Africa. The discrimination implicit in segregation did not go unnoticed by the educated Africans and they certainly made sure that in their newspapers one of which was edited by Ladoke Akintola, the British were told about how galling it was for Africans to pay cost of segregated quarters for whites in an African city. It was no secret that European administrators did not like educated Africans, those who were described by Edward Lugard, Sir Frederick’s brother and political secretary as “trousered Niggers”, and it would likely be just as correct to say that nationalism, whether African, Indian, or West Indian, developed mainly as a reaction to the covert and overt racism that go with colonialism.
This was the social situation of Lagos into which young Ladoke Akintola moved in 1930 as a pupil-teacher at the Baptist Academy. The substance of his politics was already present in the ethnic rivalry between the Igbo and the Yoruba, the political rivalry between conservative and traditionalist Northern Nigerians and the impatient and sometimes unrealistic Southern Nigerians and also in the sharpening racial antagonism between the ruler and the ruled, the African and the European. Akintola’s life from 1910 until his assassination in the coup d’état of 1966 encompasses the attempts of Akintola and other nationalists to cope with the forces and the effects of colonialism in Africa in general and Nigeria in particular, and the challenges and eventual failure of the first years of African independence.
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