Nnamdi Azikiwe

Nnamdi Benjamin Azikiwe was born on the sixteenth of November 1904 in Zungeru, in the Northern Nigeria Protectorate, to Igbo parents of Onitsha. His father served as a clerk in the British administration; his mother was descended from an Onitsha royal line. As a boy he was sent to Onitsha to be grounded in Igbo language and custom, and he took his schooling across Onitsha, Calabar, and Lagos, where he attended the Wesleyan (now Methodist) Boys' High School.

In 1925 he sailed for the United States, where — through years of labor and scholarship — he earned his undergraduate degree in political science at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, followed by graduate study there and at the University of Pennsylvania. He returned to West Africa carrying the conviction that a free press could awaken a people to their own dignity.

That conviction made him the father of modern African journalism in English. In Accra he edited the African Morning Post; back in Lagos in 1937 he founded the West African Pilot and built the Zik Group of newspapers, a chain that gave voice to Nigerian nationalism. Through the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, and through his pen, he pressed the cause of independence.

When Nigeria became a republic, Azikiwe rose to be its first President, from 1963 to 1966, having earlier served as Governor-General. Known reverently as "Zik of Africa," he devoted his long life — which closed on the eleventh of May 1996 — to the freedom and honor of his people. May his name endure as a founding light of a nation.