Nnamdi Azikiwe

Nnamdi Azikiwe was a Nigerian journalist, nationalist politician and statesman who became the country’s first president after independence. Educated partly in the United States, he built influential newspapers, helped organise nationalist politics and led the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, becoming one of the most prominent advocates of self-government in British West Africa.

Azikiwe was a central figure in the independence movement and served as governor-general and then president of Nigeria. During the civil war he initially supported Biafra before later advocating a negotiated settlement and returning to the federal side.

Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country places Nnamdi Azikiwe in the political generation that led Nigeria from colonial rule into independence. Achebe discusses the nationalist movement, the regional and ethnic tensions of the First Republic and the crisis that led to Biafra, allowing Azikiwe’s roles as nationalist leader, governor-general and first president to form part of the background against which the post-independence state fractured.