Nnamdi Azikiwe

Nnamdi Benjamin Azikiwe was born in Zungeru, in northern Nigeria, on the sixteenth of November 1904, to Igbo parents from Onitsha. He took his secondary education in Lagos, his undergraduate degree at Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) in 1930, and graduate work at Columbia and at the London School of Economics through the early 1930s.

He returned to West Africa in 1934 and founded the African Morning Post in Accra — one of the first explicitly nationalist African newspapers. He moved to Lagos in 1937 and founded the West African Pilot, which became, over the next two decades, the principal nationalist organ of British West Africa. He edited and published it personally for most of its run; the paper's readership and political reach exceeded that of any colonial-government publication in the region.

He led the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) from 1944 until Nigerian independence. He served as Premier of the Eastern Region (1954 to 1959), as the first indigenous Governor-General of Nigeria (1960 to 1963), and — after Nigeria became a republic in October 1963 — as the country's first President. He held the presidency until the military coup of January 1966.

He continued in public life after the coup, attempted unsuccessfully to mediate the Nigerian Civil War (1967 to 1970) on behalf of the Biafran cause, and remained a senior political figure in Nigerian public life through the four military regimes that followed.

He died in Enugu on the eleventh of May 1996, age ninety-one. The University of Nigeria's principal campus at Nsukka, which he founded as Premier of the Eastern Region, bears his name.

He is honored here as the journalist and statesman whose newspaper built the political vocabulary of Nigerian independence.