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Zik is 100 years old today
CHUKWUEMEKA OKORO
(with other reports)
INDEPENDENT
Nigeria’s first president, Rt. Hon. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, GCFR, Owelle of
Onitsha, would have been 100 years old today.
His death on May 11, 1996 at the age of 91
cut short his attainment of a centenary, but his mark in history more than takes
him beyond the historic point.
Zik of Africa, the great African
nationalist, was in the mould of such legends as the late Osagiyefo Dr.
Kwame Nkurumah of Ghana and the Mzee Dr. Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya.
Dr. Azikiwe died at the University of
Nigeria Teaching Hospital (UNTH), Enugu, six months short of his 92nd birthday,
eight years ago.
Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe was born on
November 16, 1904 in Zungeru, Northern Nigeria, to Onitsha parents.
At a very early age, he was exposed to the
inequities of colonialism (a realization that was to cause him to eventually
drop his anglicized first name), when his father, Obed-Edom Chukwuemeka Azikiwe,
a civilian clerk for a British army regiment, was forced to leave his job
because of discrimination.
The memory of this sorrowful event was to
have a major influence on his political attitudes and actions in the years to
come.
Like most of the African greats, young
Nnamdi had an insatiable quest for knowledge, and the rural life of
turn-of-the-century Zungeru provided only the barest minimum of educational
opportunity.
In his early years, he spoke only the
Hausa language of the north but at the age of eight, he was sent to Onitsha to
live with his paternal grandparents where, under their determined tutelage, he
became fluent in the Igbo and Yoruba languages and eventually, English.
His earliest formal schooling began at the
Roman Catholic and Church Missionary Society’s Anglican missions at Onitsha
where he excelled both in academics and sports.
Out-growing Onitsha’s academic
capabilities, Nnamdi moved on to the Wesleyan Boys High School in Lagos and then
again to the Hope Waddell Training Institute in Calabar, the historic place to
which he would return years later under much different circumstances.
In common with his fellow African greats,
schooling was insufficient to fuel his towering intellect. He read voraciously.
He devoured the philosophy of Marcus
Garvey and the writings of W. E. B. DuBois. He followed very closely the career
of The Great Aggrey of the Gold Coast.
The "Black Zionism" of Garvey intrigued
him. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk, shocked him and The Great Aggrey
inspired him.
He was to tell many years later that the
fortuitous finding and reading of an obscure 1903 DuBois publication,
Possibilities of the Negro; The Advance Guard of Race, was to be an
everlasting and enormous influence on his business and political life.
Determined to continue his education,
Azikiwe travelled the well-worn path to the United States. In 1925, at age 21,
he enrolled at Storer College at infamous Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where he
quickly acquired the nickname "Zik", by which he was to be known for the rest of
his life. He spent one year at Storer, also enrolling in an intensive
correspondence course in American Law and Procedures through LaSalle Law School
of Chicago. He excelled in both.
America of the 1920s, while offering Zik
obvious opportunities, was oftentimes disillusioning, and indeed hostile, to the
young Nigerian.
Poverty stricken, depressed and homesick
for Africa, and deeply affected by racial taunts, he went from job to job under
the name of "Ben Zik", trying to earn enough to continue with his education.
In 1926, he matriculated to Howard
University in Washington, D.C. where a hoped-for- job fell through causing even
greater financial strain. Finally, in early 1927, an offer of a steady on-campus
job at Lincoln University enabled him to complete his undergraduate degree in
Political Science.
On to Columbia University and a part-time
teaching assistantship, allowing him to obtain a certificate in journalism while
editing the Columbia University Summer Sessions Times, his first foray
into the publishing world. In 1930, Zik was back at Lincoln University where he
was awarded an M.A. in Political Science with honors and wrote and published his
first book, Liberia in World Politics. Finally, in 1932, he traveled on
to the University of Pennsylvania on a scholarship where he earned an M. Sc,
with honors in Anthropology, coming to the attention of the great Prof.
Bronislaw Malinowski of London University.
After graduation in the late spring of
1934, Zik journeyed back to Africa, passing up Malinowski’s offer of doctoral
pursuits at London University in favor of beginning his efforts on behalf of
Africa.
While in transit in the Gold Coast, Zik
met the already well-known trade unionist and newspaperman, I. T.
Wallace-Johnson of Sierra Leone. Wallace-Johnson offered Zik his first
professional employment as editor of the African Morning Post, an Accra
(Ghana) newspaper which he accepted and worked diligently at for three years,
narrowly escaping prison after being arrested for publishing a "treasonous"
article, a charge that was fortunately overturned on appeal.
In February, 1937, Zik finally returned to
Nigeria filled with a passion to somehow be of great influence in the future of
his homeland. He was very well educated.
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