Overview
Nnamdi Azikiwe was a newspaper publisher and nationalist politician who became the first President of Nigeria at independence. He was Igbo, born in Zungeru in what is now Niger State.
Biography
Azikiwe was born in Zungeru, where his father worked as a clerk in the colonial service, and grew up between northern Nigeria, Onitsha and Lagos. He studied in the United States, at Storer College, Lincoln University and Howard, and returned to West Africa as a journalist, editing the African Morning Post in Accra before founding the West African Pilot in Lagos in 1937.
The Pilot and the chain of papers he built around it carried nationalist argument to a mass readership and trained a generation of Nigerian journalists. In 1944 he helped found the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons with Herbert Macaulay, and he led the party through the constitutional conferences of the 1950s. He was Premier of the Eastern Region from 1954, Governor-General from independence in 1960, and President when Nigeria became a republic in 1963. The military coup of January 1966 ended that office. He later led the Nigerian People's Party in the Second Republic and stood unsuccessfully for president.
Notable achievements
- Founded the West African Pilot in 1937 and built a nationalist newspaper chain
- Co-founded the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons in 1944
- Premier of the Eastern Region from 1954
- Governor-General of Nigeria from 1960 and first President of the Republic from 1963
Legacy
Azikiwe is remembered as one of the central figures of the nationalist movement and as the journalist who made mass political argument possible in Nigeria. Assessments of his regional politics, and of his role in the tangled alliances of the First Republic, still differ sharply between Nigerian historians.