Remembering Herbert Macaulay
At a lecture delivered recently in Lagos, a retired diplomat and professional historian dug into the past and exhumed pieces of a man who helped shape the Nigerian identity, writes Solomon Elusoji
It is astonishing, or, perhaps, shameful, if we are to be one-eyed critics, that despite the man’s famous moustache and street credibility as the ‘Father of Nigerian Nationalism’, Herbert Macaulay does not have a single book-length biography to his name. The fact is shocking, perplexing even, when one considers that Nigeria is more than half a century into independence, a project nationalists like Macaulay devoted their lives to.
At the Lagos Country Club, on a wet morning, recently, the first Herbert Macaulay Gold Lecture was delivered by Ambassador Dapo Fafowora, a trained historian who attended the University of Ibadan in the early 1960s. Ramrod straight and alert, despite his age, the septuagenarian, who also attended Oxford University and joined the Nigerian Diplomatic Service in 1985, brought a brilliant and insightful angle to the task he was assigned. The topic was ‘Herbert Macaulay and his relevance to the excellence of Lagos’, and Fafowora did, in about an hour, a graceful exploration of Macaulay’s illustrious life.
Fafowora was only five when Macaulay died and never met him. But as a schoolboy, his late father, who was a civil servant in the colonial service and was a great admirer of Macaulay, told him about the nationalist and his struggle against colonial rule in the country. Later, when he was 12, the older Fafowora took his son to Herbert Macaulay’s house, named ‘Kirsten Hall’, at 8, Balbina Street, Lagos. “I admired the house and, for years, visited it often as I lived near-by, at Ita-Faji.” Unfortunately, an indigenous government decided to demolish the house, an impressive elegant one storey detached building, in order to build a Post Office, a decision Fafowora describes as “a singular display of the lack of a sense of history.”
Herbert Macaulay was born on November 14, 1864, at Broad Street, Lagos, to Thomas Babington Macaulay and Abigail Crowther, the second daughter of the first African Bishop, Samuel Ajayi Crowther. Macaulay’s paternal grandfather, Ojo Oriare, a native doctor, was from Oyo. He and his wife, Kilangbe, were enslaved, but freed by the British anti-slavery squadron and taken to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where they settled for a while, before returning to Owu in Abeokuta. It was while they were in Sierra Leone that Ojo and Kilangbe gave birth to Thomas Babington Macaulay. As was the practice among freed slaves in those days Thomas Babington Macaulay simply dropped his father’s name and instead adopted a Christian name.
In Freetown, the elder Macaulay was educated at the Church Mission Society (CMS) Grammar School and later at Fourah Bay College, a higher institution set up by the CMS for the training of priests. He was first sent to Abeokuta in 1854 and later ordained a priest of the Church of England in 1857. Shortly after, he returned to Owu as a CMS priest for missionary work there. But he was in Owu for only a year, returning to Lagos where, on June 6, 1859, he founded and became the first Principal of the CMS Grammar School, Nigeria’s oldest secondary grammar school.
So, Macaulay, raised by two educated parents, a rare privilege in those days, had a good start in the world. Until he was five, he was home schooled by his mother. In 1869, he enrolled at Paul’s School, Breadfruit, for his primary school education. At 13, he gained admission into the CMS Grammar School, the institution his father helped found. He left the school in 1880 and, according to his school records, he was astounding in English, Logic, Mathematics and Latin, an early sign he was destined for great things.
In September 1881, at only 17, he was appointed a clerical assistant and indexer of Crown Land grants in the colonial Public Works Department (PWD) in Lagos. Within three years of his appointment, he was promoted as a draughtsman and clerk of Crown Land grants. He was so diligent in his duties that he was awarded a colonial government scholarship in 1890 for further studies in England in civil engineering and surveying, a first of its kind in those days. Fafowora notes that that scholarship award later proved to be a mistake by the British. “It exposed him to the genteel British way of life and liberal democracy,” he said.
For the next three years, he was in Plymouth, England, studying, not only civil engineering, but architecture, surveying, including railway surveying. He qualified as a civil engineer in 1893, the first Nigerian
Macaulay had seen how the colonial authorities looked down on Africans, even when they were fully qualified. He decided he would devote the rest of his life to fighting against this gross injustice and for the emancipation of the Africans from colonial rule. That was the origin of his long and difficult nationalist and patriotic struggle against foreign rule and domination in Nigeria