Nigeria's first president grew up speaking all three of its major languages
Nnamdi Azikiwe, called Zik of Africa, was born in the north, raised partly in the east and schooled in Lagos, so by college he spoke Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba. That rare fluency suited the man who became Nigeria's first native governor-general and then its first president.
Born on 16 November 1904 in Zungeru, Northern Nigeria, he was given an Igbo name meaning my father is alive. His father was a clerk in the British administration, and his mother descended from the royal line of Onitsha. As a small boy he spoke Hausa better than Igbo, which worried his father enough to send him to Onitsha in 1912 to live with his grandmother and aunt and learn his own language.
His schooling followed his father's postings. A dog bite in 1914 brought him to Lagos to recover and continue his studies, then he returned to Onitsha to finish secondary school, working as a student-teacher to support his mother, and later went to college in Calabar. At a Lagos Methodist school he befriended sons of old Lagos families, contacts that later helped his politics. A gift of a biography of James Garfield, the American president who rose from humble beginnings, fired his ambition, and a lecture by the educator James Aggrey, who urged Africans to study abroad and come home to change things, pointed him to America.
In the United States, where people called him Ben, he attended Storer College, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania and Howard. A keen athlete, he even asked colonial officials to let him represent Nigeria at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics.
Back in Africa in 1934, he worked as a journalist in the Gold Coast, now Ghana, and campaigned across British West Africa for Nigerian and African nationalism. He is widely seen as a founding father of Nigeria and a key force behind independence in 1960. He was governor-general from that year until 1963, then president under the First Republic until 1966, and died in 1996.
Source: Nnamdi Azikiwe
