Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s place in Nigerian history is secure: he stands as a visionary nationalist, a pioneering regional premier, and a principal architect of federalism in Nigeria’s political evolution. Yet his political imagination did not emerge solely from the colonial centres of Lagos or Ibadan. As historian Insa Nolte demonstrates in Obafemi Awolowo and the Making of Remo: The Local Politics of a Nigerian Nationalist (Africa World Press, 2010), Awolowo’s intellectual and moral formation was deeply shaped by the civic, cultural, and institutional life of Remo, a cluster of Yoruba towns in present-day Ogun State.
Rather than treating Awolowo as a product of abstract nationalism, Nolte situates him within Remo’s distinctive civic traditions, where communal deliberation, self-help, and educational advancement defined the meaning of citizenship. Her study repositions Remo not as a provincial background, but as an essential foundation for understanding Awolowo’s later ideals of participatory democracy, social welfare, and cooperative development.
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Remo: A Political and Cultural Foundation
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Remo had become one of southwestern Nigeria’s most active civic regions. The Akarigbo of Remo, its paramount ruler, presided over a network of interrelated towns linked by kinship, commerce, and shared cultural institutions. Christian missions, particularly Wesleyan and Anglican, had introduced literacy and new models of schooling that fostered a growing class of professionals and civic-minded elites.
Born in 1909 in Ikenne-Remo, Awolowo grew up in an environment where education, diligence, and community service were deeply valued. His early years in mission schools reflected an ethos of disciplined achievement and collective responsibility. These local experiences, as Nolte and other scholars such as S. Ademola Ajayi note, profoundly informed his later conviction that education was the foundation of both personal advancement and national development.
Remo’s civic life was defined by active public participation. Town unions, youth associations, and community councils encouraged dialogue, accountability, and cooperation. Though informal, these institutions fostered habits of consensus and self-organisation. Nolte suggests that such participatory practices offered the young Awolowo an early model of structured deliberation, a model he would later adapt into a modern political framework.
From Local Engagement to National Vision
Awolowo’s political thought emerged as a synthesis of his Remo upbringing and his engagement with broader national and international ideas. His early involvement in community organisation in Ikenne taught him the value of disciplined cooperation, while his legal training in London (culminating in his call to the bar in 1946) expanded his understanding of governance and law.
In 1947, Awolowo published Path to Nigerian Freedom, a groundbreaking treatise that articulated federalism as the most viable structure for governing Nigeria’s ethnic and cultural diversity. This work blended his appreciation for local autonomy, rooted in Remo’s decentralised traditions, with a modern constitutional vision of statecraft.
When he founded the Action Group in 1951, Awolowo’s organisational approach reflected his Remo heritage: disciplined, cooperative, and community-based. The party’s system of branches and committees embodied his belief that democracy must be anchored in active citizen participation. While not a direct imitation of Remo’s town unions, the Action Group’s structure expressed similar civic values of shared responsibility and coordinated service.
Economic and Educational Reform in Context
As Premier of the Western Region (1954–1959), Awolowo implemented policies that transformed the region’s social and economic landscape. His Free Primary Education Scheme of 1955 became a landmark achievement, expanding access to schooling and literacy across the region. His administration also promoted rural health care, cooperative farming, and industrial development aimed at self-reliance and poverty reduction.
These reforms were not mere bureaucratic projects. They drew moral and philosophical inspiration from the communal ethos of Remo, where towns historically pooled resources to fund schools, scholarships, and public works. As Ajayi observes, Awolowo’s emphasis on universal education reflected both the missionary legacy of his hometown and his belief in the social duty of government.
Yet, as Nolte carefully notes, Remo’s influence should not be overstated. Awolowo’s policies were also shaped by global post-war debates on welfare economics, British Fabian thought, and his engagement with other African nationalists. His political genius lay in synthesising these varied sources, blending indigenous communal ethics with modern statecraft to create a distinctive model of democratic governance.
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Colonial Mediation and Political Negotiation
Under British indirect rule, Yoruba political structures, including those in Remo, underwent significant transformation. The Akarigbo and other traditional rulers found their authority mediated by colonial administrators, while educated elites gained influence through literacy and civic activism. The resulting tensions between hereditary rulers and emerging civic leaders defined the political environment in which Awolowo matured.
From these dynamics, Awolowo learned that legitimacy must be negotiated, not assumed, a lesson that would shape his later insistence on constitutionalism, due process, and political accountability. His exposure to both colonial bureaucracy and local governance refined his understanding of authority and reform, preparing him to navigate Nigeria’s complex path toward independence.
Legacy and Interpretation
The interplay between Remo’s local traditions and Awolowo’s national vision highlights the enduring relationship between community-based ethics and modern political innovation in Nigerian history. Nolte’s research demonstrates that Nigeria’s political modernity evolved not through the erasure of indigenous systems, but through their adaptation and rearticulation within new national frameworks.
Awolowo’s advocacy of public accountability, cooperative enterprise, and social welfare can thus be seen as modern expressions of Remo’s civic ideals, recalibrated for a larger, more diverse polity. His politics combined moral conviction with administrative precision, reflecting both his Yoruba heritage and his cosmopolitan education.
Still, as scholars like Wale Adebanwi and Olufemi Vaughan remind us, Awolowo’s worldview was shaped by multiple influences, from Remo’s communal values to British liberalism and anti-colonial nationalism. Nolte’s achievement lies in restoring this local dimension without diminishing the global and national contexts that equally shaped his thought.
Obafemi Awolowo and the Making of Remo offers a nuanced and historically grounded account of how local experience can shape national transformation. Insa Nolte’s study reminds us that the roots of Nigerian modernity lie not only in colonial institutions or nationalist rhetoric, but also in indigenous civic traditions that valued education, consensus, and collective progress.
Author’s Note
Awolowo’s vision of social democracy and cooperative development was not an imported ideology; it was an adaptation, a creative dialogue between Remo’s communal ethics and the modern demands of state governance. His life demonstrates that lasting reform often begins in communities where leadership is understood as a shared moral responsibility rather than a personal pursuit of power.
References:
Obafemi Awolowo, Path to Nigerian Freedom (Faber & Faber, 1947).
Insa Nolte, Obafemi Awolowo and the Making of Remo: The Local Politics of a Nigerian Nationalist (Africa World Press, 2010).
S. Ademola Ajayi, The Development of Free Primary Education in Western Nigeria, 1952–1966: An Analysis.
Wale Adebanwi and Olufemi Vaughan, reviews of Nolte’s Obafemi Awolowo and the Making of Remo (2011), interpretive analyses of Nolte’s methodology and findings.
