The introduction of Western education in Nigeria during the colonial era reshaped the country’s intellectual and social fabric. British rule expanded access to formal literacy but also entrenched inequalities between regions, classes, and cultures. From coastal mission schools to government colleges built under indirect rule, education became both a pathway to opportunity and a mechanism of imperial control. The legacies of this dual purpose, empowerment and subjugation, remain deeply embedded in Nigeria’s education system today.
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Missionary Beginnings: Literacy and Evangelism
Before Britain formally established colonial rule in the late nineteenth century, Christian missionary societies had already laid the foundation for Western education in southern Nigeria. The Church Missionary Society (CMS), Wesleyan Methodist Mission, and Roman Catholic missions were among the earliest to found schools in Lagos, Abeokuta, Onitsha, and Calabar during the 1840s and 1850s.
For these missions, literacy was a tool of conversion. Reading and writing enabled converts to access the Bible and other Christian texts in local languages. Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a former enslaved Yoruba who became the first African Anglican bishop, played a pioneering role. His translation of the Bible into Yoruba and publication of the first Yoruba grammar (1843) not only advanced Christian evangelism but also preserved linguistic heritage. As a result, Yoruba became one of the earliest African languages to develop a standardized written form.
Yet missionary education was largely concentrated in the south. The north, with its strong Islamic emirates and established Qur’anic schools, resisted missionary intrusion. British officials later endorsed this separation, ensuring that Western-style education developed unevenly, a regional divide that continues to shape Nigeria’s literacy landscape.
The Colonial State and Education for Administration
As British control expanded after the 1880s, the colonial government began to formalize education policy. Its goal was not universal schooling but administrative efficiency. Education was intended to produce a small cadre of literate Africans, clerks, interpreters, teachers, and technicians, who would assist in governance without challenging colonial authority.
This philosophy mirrored Lord Frederick Lugard’s system of indirect rule, which preserved traditional hierarchies to maintain order. Lugard believed education should train efficient subordinates rather than politically conscious citizens. Early policy instruments reflected this limited vision. The 1887 Education Ordinance (Lagos) introduced modest government oversight and grants-in-aid for mission schools. Subsequent regional ordinances in 1908 (Southern Protectorate) and 1916 (Northern Protectorate) introduced school inspections and curricular regulation. After the 1914 Amalgamation, these measures culminated in the 1926 Education Ordinance, which unified the system across Nigeria, though still with minimal state funding or direct provision for mass education.
By the 1920s, over 90% of schools were run by missionary agencies, and public education remained a privilege of the few.
Two Systems, One Colony: The North–South Divide
Colonial education policy entrenched Nigeria’s regional imbalance. In the Northern Protectorate, British administrators feared that Western education would undermine the authority of the emirs and Islamic institutions. Consequently, missionary activity was restricted, and the few government schools that emerged were designed for the children of chiefs and nobles. Schools like Kano Middle School (later Rumfa College, founded 1927) trained select northern elites in both English and Arabic for administrative service.
In contrast, the Southern Provinces witnessed rapid educational expansion through missionary enterprise. By the 1920s, thousands of children attended primary schools run by the CMS, Methodist, and Catholic missions. Literacy rates rose, and Western education became a ladder to clerical jobs, teaching, and professional advancement. The contrast produced what Lugard famously described in The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1922) as “two different Nigerias”, one southern, Christian, and literate; the other northern, Islamic, and traditional.
While financial and logistical challenges also limited northern schooling, the British government’s policy of containment ensured that regional inequality became a structural feature of Nigeria’s educational landscape.
Reform and the Phelps-Stokes Influence
By the early twentieth century, the inadequacies of mission-led education were increasingly apparent. Many schools had poorly trained teachers, narrow religious curricula, and little emphasis on vocational or community-oriented learning. The Phelps-Stokes Commission on Education in Africa (1920–1924), sponsored by American philanthropists, investigated these shortcomings and recommended reforms emphasizing agriculture, health, moral training, and teacher education.
In response, British colonial administrators introduced gradual reforms. The 1926 Education Ordinance improved inspection systems and expanded teacher training. The most significant development was the creation of Yaba Higher College, conceived in 1932 and opened in 1934, as Nigeria’s first institution of higher learning. It trained teachers, medical assistants, and technicians to serve colonial administration. While often hailed as the first tertiary institution in British West Africa, Makerere College (Uganda, 1922) actually predated it. Nonetheless, Yaba symbolized a turning point, the beginning of higher education in Nigeria.
Implementation of the Phelps-Stokes recommendations, however, remained partial; colonial funding and access to schooling continued to favour urban and southern elites.
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Education and Nationalism: From Classrooms to Campaigns
Ironically, the colonial education system designed to sustain imperial rule also nurtured the leaders who dismantled it. Western-educated Nigerians became pioneers of journalism, trade unionism, and nationalist politics. Mission schools, government colleges, and university halls evolved into spaces for debate, activism, and anti-colonial organization.
Figures such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, and Ahmadu Bello, each shaped by their region’s educational systems, recognized education as the foundation of national self-determination. Newspapers like The West African Pilot and student groups such as the Nigerian Youth Movement (founded 1934) became platforms for political consciousness.
By the 1940s and 1950s, nationalist leaders linked educational expansion to demands for self-government. The Western Region’s free primary education policy of 1955, championed by Awolowo’s Action Group, represented a direct effort to democratize learning and counter colonial inequities. Similar though slower efforts followed in the Eastern and Northern Regions.
Curriculum and Language: The Cultural Dimension
Colonial education carried profound cultural implications. The curriculum prioritized English literature, European history, and Christian moral instruction, while African history and indigenous knowledge were marginalized. English became the language of power and modernity, while local languages were relegated to the early years of schooling.
Early missionaries like Crowther had promoted literacy in native languages, but as the colonial bureaucracy expanded, English was institutionalized as the medium of governance and upward mobility. This produced a Western-educated elite fluent in the language of empire yet often alienated from indigenous cultural roots.
Writers such as Chinua Achebe later explored this tension, how colonial education simultaneously empowered and estranged the African mind.
Legacies and Lessons
By independence in 1960, Nigeria inherited an education system marked by deep regional imbalance, linguistic dependence on English, and an elitist orientation. Southern literacy rates far exceeded those in the north, and educational attainment became a symbol of class distinction and political advantage.
Post-independence governments sought to redress these disparities through initiatives such as the Universal Primary Education (UPE) scheme of 1976 and the Universal Basic Education (UBE) programme of 1999. Yet many enduring inequities, from uneven school access to the dominance of English, trace directly to the colonial blueprint.
Colonial education in Nigeria was both a foundation and a constraint a force for literacy and mobility, yet also an instrument of inequality and cultural displacement. It produced the intellectuals who led Nigeria to independence, even as it embedded structural divisions that persist today.
Author’s Note
For Nigeria’s education system to truly serve national development, it must confront and transcend these colonial legacies by valuing indigenous knowledge, promoting multilingual education, and ensuring equitable access across all regions. Only by doing so can Nigeria move beyond empire’s classrooms toward an education system that reflects its own values, languages, and aspirations.
References:
Fafunwa, A. B. (1974). History of Education in Nigeria. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Taiwo, C. O. (1980). The Nigerian Education System: Past, Present and Future. Lagos: Thomas Nelson.
Coleman, J. S. (1958). Nigeria: Background to Nationalism. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lugard, F. D. (1922). The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons.
Ajayi, J. F. A., et al. (1996). Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841–1891: The Making of a New Elite. Longman.
