Michael Adekunle Ajasin at Fourah Bay College represents an important chapter in the life of one of twentieth-century Nigeria’s notable educationists and political leaders. A photograph circulated with a 1945 date shows Ajasin during the period in which he was studying in Sierra Leone, years before he became the first elected executive governor of Ondo State.
The accompanying caption names two other men as Adenuga and Laosebikan. Their full identities are not preserved in the widely available caption, but the date places the image within a firmly established period in Ajasin’s life. He studied at Fourah Bay College from 1943 to 1946, when the institution was one of the most important centres of Western-style higher education available to students from British West Africa.
The photograph is particularly striking because Ajasin was not a young school-leaver when he arrived in Sierra Leone. By the mid-1940s, he was already an experienced teacher and headmaster who had spent more than a decade working in Nigerian schools.
From Owo to a Career in Education
Michael Adekunle Ajasin was born in Owo on 28 November 1908. His early education included St Paul’s CMS School in Owo before he attended St Andrew’s College, Oyo, from 1924 to 1927.
Teaching became the foundation of his professional life.
In 1928, Ajasin began work as an assistant teacher at St Andrew’s CMS School in Warri. Two years later, he became headmaster of St Luke’s CMS School in Sapele. He remained there from 1930 until 1943.
By the time he left Nigeria for further study, he had therefore spent about fifteen years in teaching and school administration.
This background is essential to understanding the Ajasin seen in photographs from his university period. In 1945, he was 36 for most of the year and turned 37 in November. He was a mature student strengthening an already substantial career in education.
His years at Fourah Bay were not the beginning of his intellectual development. They were a continuation of a professional journey that had already taken him through teacher training, classroom instruction and school leadership.
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Michael Adekunle Ajasin at Fourah Bay College, 1943 to 1946
Michael Adekunle Ajasin at Fourah Bay College belonged to a generation of West Africans who often had to cross colonial borders to obtain university-level education.
Fourah Bay College had been founded in Sierra Leone by the Church Missionary Society on 18 February 1827. Its early purpose included the training of African teachers, catechists and clergy.
The institution developed into a major centre of higher learning for Anglophone West Africa. Its historical importance increased considerably when it became formally affiliated with Durham University in 1876. The relationship between Fourah Bay College and Durham continued until 1967.
For generations of students from territories such as Nigeria, the Gold Coast, the Gambia and Sierra Leone, Fourah Bay represented an important route into higher education at a time when university opportunities within British West Africa remained severely limited.
Its influence helped give Freetown its historical reputation as the “Athens of West Africa”, a description associated with the city’s unusually strong concentration of schools, colleges, clergy, professionals and educated African elites.
Ajasin entered this academic world in 1943.
He studied English, Modern History and Economics, completing his Bachelor of Arts degree in June 1946. The combination of subjects was particularly suited to a man already committed to education and increasingly interested in public affairs.
His Fourah Bay years also placed him within a wider West African intellectual environment. Students from different territories met within an institution whose graduates had already entered education, the church, administration, law and politics across the region.
The 1945 Photograph and Fourah Bay’s Wartime Years
The photograph associated with Ajasin’s student years is commonly dated 1945. That year falls directly within his documented period at Fourah Bay College.
One detail about the setting, however, gives the image additional historical context.
The famous Old Fourah Bay College building in eastern Freetown had ceased regular use by the college during the Second World War. Historical documentation preserved through Sierra Leone’s submission to the UNESCO World Heritage Centre records that the institution was temporarily moved outside Freetown for security reasons.
The wartime relocation means that Fourah Bay College life during Ajasin’s years there differed from the institution’s earlier period in its famous nineteenth-century building.
The college later developed at Mount Aureol, which became the location associated with the modern Fourah Bay College.
Whatever the precise setting of the 1945 photograph, it belongs to an unusual moment in the history of the institution itself, when a college already more than a century old was operating through the disruption caused by the Second World War.
From Sierra Leone to London
Ajasin completed his Fourah Bay studies in 1946 but did not immediately return to school administration in Nigeria.
He proceeded to the Institute of Education at the University of London, where he undertook further professional study in education from 1946 to 1947.
This additional training strengthened the qualifications of a man who had already spent much of his adult life teaching.
In 1947, Ajasin returned to Nigeria and became principal of Imade College in Owo. He remained principal until 1962.
His work there placed him at the centre of educational development in his home area. He later founded Owo High School and became its first principal in 1963, remaining there until 1975.
The chronology is significant. Long before Ajasin was widely known as a politician, education had occupied decades of his life.
Ajasin and the Free Education Movement
Ajasin’s educational experience eventually became closely connected with his political activities.
He became a prominent member of the Action Group, the political party led by Obafemi Awolowo. Ajasin served as the party’s first vice-president and also became involved in its discussions on educational development.
Historical accounts and later scholarship give Ajasin an important place in the development of the Action Group’s free education policy. During the early 1950s, when the party was developing programmes for the Western Region, Ajasin advanced proposals for expanding access to education.
The policy became one of the defining achievements of the Action Group government in Western Nigeria. Free primary education was introduced in the Western Region in January 1955 under the government led by Awolowo.
Ajasin’s contribution belongs within this wider collective political achievement. The programme required legislative commitment, finance, teachers, new classrooms and extensive administrative planning. It was implemented by a regional government, not by one individual.
Nevertheless, Ajasin’s role in the intellectual development of education policy reflected the experience of a man who had spent years inside classrooms and schools before entering the highest levels of politics.
From School Principal to Political Leader
Ajasin’s public career extended beyond educational policy.
He served as chairman of the Owo District Council from 1954 to 1956 and was a member of Nigeria’s House of Representatives during the late colonial and First Republic era.
His career placed him among the political figures attempting to shape Nigeria during the final years of British colonial rule and the first years after independence.
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Following years of military government, Nigeria returned to civilian rule in 1979. Ajasin became a leading figure in the Unity Party of Nigeria, the political organisation led by Obafemi Awolowo during the Second Republic.
In 1979, Ajasin was elected governor of Ondo State.
His election represented a remarkable transition for a man whose professional life had begun in the classroom more than fifty years earlier. He became the first elected executive governor of the state and remained in office until the military takeover at the end of 1983.
Higher Education Under the Ajasin Government
Education remained part of Ajasin’s programme as governor.
During the 1979 election campaign, he had included the establishment of a university among his promises to the people of Ondo State.
His government subsequently pursued the project. In March 1981, Ajasin announced plans for a multi-campus university and established a committee to develop proposals for the institution.
On 19 February 1982, he announced Professor Ifedayo Olawole Oladapo as the institution’s first vice-chancellor.
The university was formally established through Obafemi Awolowo University Law No. 3 of 1982, passed on 29 March 1982. Its first council met at Ado-Ekiti immediately afterwards, and the university held its first matriculation ceremony in March 1983.
The institution was renamed Ondo State University in 1985.
Following the creation of Ekiti State in 1996 and subsequent changes in ownership, the Ado-Ekiti institution developed into what is today Ekiti State University.
Ondo State later established another university at Akungba-Akoko in 1999. That institution was subsequently named Adekunle Ajasin University in honour of the former governor.
The distinction between the two universities is important. The university created directly under Ajasin’s administration in 1982 was established at Ado-Ekiti and belongs to the institutional history of present-day Ekiti State University. Adekunle Ajasin University at Akungba-Akoko was established later and named in his memory.
Fourah Bay in the Making of an Educationist
It would be too simple to claim that Fourah Bay College alone transformed Ajasin into the political leader he eventually became.
His development stretched across many decades.
Before Fourah Bay came his schooling and teacher training in Nigeria, followed by fifteen years of teaching and headship. After Sierra Leone came professional study in London, the leadership of Imade College and Owo High School, participation in Action Group politics, legislative service and ultimately the governorship of Ondo State.
Fourah Bay was nevertheless an important part of that progression.
When Ajasin arrived in Sierra Leone in 1943, Nigeria did not yet have a university of its own. University College Ibadan opened in 1948, two years after Ajasin completed his Fourah Bay degree.
His journey therefore illustrates a broader chapter in West African educational history, when Nigerians seeking advanced qualifications often travelled to Sierra Leone, Britain and other parts of the world.
Fourah Bay connected these students to a regional intellectual network that existed across colonial boundaries long before the emergence of the modern universities that later transformed higher education in independent West Africa.
Conclusion: From Schoolmaster to Statesman
The image associated with Michael Adekunle Ajasin’s Fourah Bay years captures one stage in a much larger life.
By 1945, Ajasin was already an experienced educator. He had taught in Warri, managed a school in Sapele and travelled to Sierra Leone for university education. He would graduate in 1946, study further in London, return to Owo to lead schools and become increasingly involved in the politics of education and government.
Decades later, he would become the first elected executive governor of Ondo State.
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Seen within that full chronology, the Fourah Bay period is significant not because one photograph can explain the making of a statesman, but because it records the educational journey of a man whose career consistently connected learning with public service.
Author’s Note
Michael Adekunle Ajasin’s life demonstrates how deeply education and public leadership were connected in the careers of many Nigerians who came of age during the colonial period. His journey from teacher and headmaster to Fourah Bay graduate, school principal, policy advocate, legislator and governor was built over decades. The enduring lesson of his career is that political leadership did not begin for him at the ballot box. It grew from years spent teaching, learning, administering institutions and thinking seriously about how education could expand opportunity for society.
References
Adegoke, Segun and Ebenezer Babatope. Michael Adekunle Ajasin: Triumph of Idealism. Spectrum Books, 1995.
Biographical Legacy and Research Foundation. “AJASIN, Chief Michael Adekunle.” Biographical record covering Ajasin’s education, teaching career, political offices and public service.
University of Sierra Leone. “Fourah Bay College.” Institutional history of the college and its foundation in 1827.
Durham University Archives and Special Collections. Records concerning Fourah Bay College and its formal affiliation with Durham University from 1876 to 1967.
UNESCO World Heritage Centre. “Old Fourah Bay College Building.” Sierra Leone Tentative List submission describing the college’s historical importance and wartime relocation.
Ekiti State University. “Creation and Early History of the University.” Institutional history covering Ajasin’s university initiative, the 1982 enabling law and later changes to the institution.
Martineau, Jean-Luc. “From the Free Education Scheme to the Defence of Nigerian Democracy in the Yoruba Area: The Emblematic Career of Michael A. Ajasin, 1908–1997.” Cahiers d’Études africaines, 2025.
