Nnamdi Azikiwe: The Journalist Who Became Nigeria's First President

Nnamdi Azikiwe was born on November 16, 1904, in Zungeru, then the administrative capital of the Northern Nigeria Protectorate, to Igbo parents from Onitsha. His father worked as a clerk in the British colonial civil service, a job that moved the family around the country and put young Azikiwe through school in Onitsha and Lagos before he passed his own civil service exam in 1921 and took a post in the colonial Treasury Department.

He left that job behind in 1925 for the United States, enrolling first at Storer College in West Virginia and later attending Howard University before earning a bachelor’s degree in political science from Lincoln University, the historically Black college in Pennsylvania, in 1930. He stayed on to teach and study further, adding a second degree from Lincoln and a master’s from the University of Pennsylvania by 1933, and later pursued doctoral research on Liberia’s place in world politics at Columbia University. He supported himself along the way writing for the Baltimore Afro-American, the Philadelphia Tribune and the Associated Negro Press, and it was in the United States that he first encountered the Pan-Africanist ideas of Marcus Garvey that would shape his politics back home.

Azikiwe returned to Africa in 1934, not to Nigeria but to the Gold Coast, where he became editor of the newly founded African Morning Post in Accra and used the paper to needle British colonial authorities. He returned to Lagos in 1937 and founded the West African Pilot, a paper built explicitly to campaign for African self-government. It grew into the Zik Group of Newspapers, which by 1944 controlled five major publications spread across Nigerian cities; over the following years the chain expanded further, eventually giving Azikiwe a controlling interest in more than a dozen African-run dailies, among them the Nigerian Spokesman in Onitsha, the Eastern Guardian in Port Harcourt and the Comet, which he moved to Kano as the city’s first daily paper. The newspapers doubled as a political organizing tool, carrying his columns under the byline “The Inside Stuff by Zik” alongside coverage that pushed the case for independence.

His political career followed the same trajectory as his newspapers, moving from the regions to the national stage. He co-founded the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons with Herbert Macaulay in 1944, entered the Nigerian Legislative Council in 1947, and became premier of the Eastern Region in 1954, a post that required him to give up his newspaper business interests. When Nigeria’s Senate was created ahead of independence, Azikiwe became its first president, serving from January to October 1960. He then became the country’s first indigenous Governor-General on November 16, 1960, his 56th birthday, succeeding the outgoing British colonial administrator; the same day, Queen Elizabeth II named him to the British monarch’s Privy Council. Three years later, when Nigeria declared itself a republic on October 1, 1963, Azikiwe was elected its first president, sharing power with Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa under the constitution’s ceremonial-presidency system.

Azikiwe’s presidency ended in the military coup of January 15-16, 1966, which killed Balewa and several regional leaders. He went on to become a prominent voice for the Igbo cause during the Nigerian Civil War, though he broke publicly with Biafra’s leadership before the war’s end in 1970. Nigeria’s government allowed him back into public life afterward, and he served as chancellor of the University of Lagos from 1972 to 1976.

Azikiwe grew up speaking Hausa, the language of the northern town where he was born, alongside the Igbo of his parents’ Onitsha homeland; he later learned Yoruba in Lagos and English through his colonial schooling, a linguistic range that mirrored the nationwide political career he built spanning all three of Nigeria’s major regions. He also wrote prolifically outside his newspaper columns, publishing works including his 1934 study “Liberia in World Politics,” a 1937 political tract titled “Renascent Africa,” and a lengthy 1970 autobiography, “My Odyssey.” He died on May 11, 1996, at a teaching hospital in Enugu, having outlived the First Republic he led by three decades.