Herbert Macaulay and Nigerian Nationalism became closely connected during the first decades of the twentieth century, when colonial Lagos was developing new forms of organised political resistance. Herbert Samuel Heelas Macaulay, born in Lagos on 14 November 1864, emerged from a distinguished educated African family. His father, Thomas Babington Macaulay, founded CMS Grammar School, Lagos, while his maternal grandfather was Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the first African Anglican bishop.
Macaulay did not invent political opposition to British rule. Lagos already possessed newspapers, lawyers, merchants, professionals, traditional institutions and civic organisations that challenged taxation, racial discrimination, land policy and colonial authority. Figures such as John Randle, Orisadipe Obasa, Christopher Sapara Williams, John Payne Jackson and Thomas Horatio Jackson helped shape this political culture.
What distinguished Macaulay was his ability to bring several methods of political action together. He worked through newspapers, petitions, public meetings, traditional institutions, legal disputes and, eventually, organised electoral politics. His career connected the politics of nineteenth-century Lagos elites with the party-based nationalist movements that would become increasingly important during the twentieth century.
From Colonial Surveyor to Political Agitator
Macaulay trained in surveying and civil engineering in Britain and returned to Lagos in 1893. He worked in the colonial service as a surveyor of Crown lands before leaving government employment in 1898 and entering private practice.
His professional background drew him into disputes over land, compensation and the meaning of indigenous ownership under colonial rule. These questions became central to Lagos politics.
One of the most important cases of the period was Amodu Tijani v Secretary, Southern Nigeria, decided by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in 1921. The dispute concerned land at Apapa that had been acquired by the colonial government for public purposes. Amodu Tijani, head of the Oluwa family, argued for compensation based upon indigenous rights in the land. Macaulay assisted the campaign surrounding the case.
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The Privy Council recognised the substantial character of indigenous communal land rights and rejected an interpretation that would have reduced those interests to little more than nominal claims. The decision became an important episode in Nigerian legal history and strengthened Macaulay’s reputation as an advocate for Lagos interests against colonial policies.
He also became closely associated with the political interests of the House of Docemo, or Dosunmu, and with Eshugbayi Eleko, the traditional ruler of Lagos. Conflicts surrounding the Eleko’s recognition, deposition and deportation became major political controversies. Macaulay’s support for traditional Lagos authority helped him build influence beyond the relatively small educated elite.
Herbert Macaulay and Nigerian Nationalism in Colonial Lagos
The nationalism associated with Macaulay developed gradually. His early political battles were not simply demands for immediate independence from Britain. They frequently centred on land, taxation, racial inequality, traditional authority, representation and the right of Lagosians to participate meaningfully in decisions affecting their communities.
These local struggles nevertheless helped create a broader political language.
Macaulay demonstrated that colonial government could be challenged through several channels at once. Legal arguments could reinforce public agitation. Newspapers could transform individual grievances into political controversies. Traditional institutions could work alongside educated professionals. Political organisation could convert dissatisfaction into sustained pressure.
This combination would become increasingly important as constitutional reform introduced a limited electoral principle.
The Clifford Constitution Opened a Very Narrow Door
The constitutional changes associated with Governor Sir Hugh Clifford represented an important turning point, although they fell far short of democratic government.
The Nigeria (Legislative Council) Order in Council, 1922 was made at Buckingham Palace on 21 November 1922. It came into operation on 1 June 1923 after a proclamation published in the Nigeria Gazette on 26 April.
The new Legislative Council contained the Governor as president, 26 official members, no more than 15 nominated unofficial members and only four elected unofficial members.
Three elected seats represented Lagos. One represented Calabar.
Even within those two areas, voting rights were severely restricted. An elector had to be male, at least 21 years old, ordinarily resident in the relevant municipal area for the required period and possess a gross annual income of at least £100.
Women could not vote. Poorer men were excluded by the income requirement. Nigerians outside Lagos and Calabar had no direct vote for these Legislative Council seats.
The colonial administration therefore retained overwhelming power.
Yet the four elected seats created something politically significant. Candidates now needed voters. Voters required registration and mobilisation. Political organisations needed programmes, candidates, newspapers, meetings and campaign structures.
A constitution designed to preserve colonial rule had inadvertently created incentives for organised electoral opposition.
Nigeria’s Elections Began Before 1923
The history of Nigerian elections requires an important distinction between municipal and Legislative Council elections.
Elective representation had already appeared in Lagos before the Clifford Constitution. The Lagos Township Ordinance of 1919 provided for elected membership of the Lagos Town Council, and municipal elections took place in 1920.
The election of 20 September 1923 therefore was not the first occasion on which an election occurred within colonial Nigeria.
Its importance was different.
It was the first general election for the elective seats created in the new Legislative Council. Three representatives were to be chosen in Lagos and one in Calabar.
That difference is crucial. The 1920 municipal election belonged to local government in Lagos. The 1923 contest introduced electoral competition into the central Legislative Council established under the Clifford constitutional system.
It was this new opportunity that helped accelerate the development of organised party politics.
The NNDP and the Rise of Electoral Organisation
The Nigerian National Democratic Party, or NNDP, emerged in Lagos in 1923 as politicians prepared to contest the new Legislative Council seats.
Macaulay became its most influential strategist and enduring public personality, but the NNDP was not the work of one man alone. Thomas Horatio Jackson and other Lagos political figures were involved in its formation and development. Leading figures associated with the new party included lawyers, professionals and established participants in Lagos public life.
The NNDP is commonly described as Nigeria’s first political party. More precisely, it became the country’s first major durable electoral party under the new Legislative Council system. Political associations such as the People’s Union had already existed and organised around public issues before 1923.
What distinguished the NNDP was its systematic pursuit of electoral power.
The result was immediate.
In the September 1923 election, NNDP candidates Joseph Egerton Shyngle, Eric Moore and Crispin Curtis Adeniyi-Jones won all three Lagos seats. The fourth elected seat, representing Calabar, went to Kwamina Ata-Amonu, an independent candidate.
The NNDP subsequently dominated much of Lagos electoral politics through the 1920s and into the 1930s before the Nigerian Youth Movement broke its dominance in 1938.
Despite the word “Nigerian” in its name, however, the NNDP should not be mistaken for the nationwide mass parties of later decades. Its practical electoral strength was overwhelmingly concentrated in Lagos because the constitutional structure itself restricted elected Legislative Council representation to Lagos and Calabar.
Its national importance lay mainly in what it demonstrated: African political organisations could select candidates, mobilise voters, contest colonial constitutional institutions and win.
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Why Macaulay Could Not Take a Legislative Council Seat
One of the great ironies of the NNDP story is that its dominant political strategist could not himself become one of its elected legislators.
In 1913 Macaulay had been convicted in connection with funds belonging to an estate for which he served as executor and received a sentence of two years’ imprisonment.
The conviction had concrete constitutional consequences.
Article 15 of the 1922 Legislative Council Order disqualified a person who had received specified serious criminal sentences, including imprisonment exceeding one year, from election unless that person had received a free pardon.
Macaulay therefore exercised his greatest political influence outside the Legislative Council chamber.
He organised, campaigned, mobilised opinion and helped determine which candidates entered the legislature. His career demonstrated that political power did not always require elected office.
Macaulay and the Lagos Daily News
Journalism became another powerful weapon in Macaulay’s political battles. Macaulay did not found the Lagos Daily News.
The newspaper was founded by Lagos bookseller Victor Babamuboni in November 1925. The original venture survived only briefly.
In 1927, Macaulay and Dr J. Akilade Caulcrick purchased the newspaper and its printing establishment. Macaulay became its controlling editor and joint proprietor.
Under his direction, the revived Lagos Daily News developed into an aggressive political newspaper closely associated with his campaigns. It attacked opponents, promoted causes and gave Macaulay another means of influencing public opinion.
His significance lay in acquiring the newspaper and transforming it into an instrument of partisan political communication.
Later Nigerian nationalist leaders would develop the relationship between journalism and politics on an even larger scale. Nnamdi Azikiwe, in particular, built a formidable newspaper network that connected nationalist journalism with mass political mobilisation.
Lagos as a Political Laboratory
The importance of Lagos to Nigeria’s later independence movement cannot be explained by Macaulay alone.
The city was the colonial capital, an important port and commercial centre, and home to lawyers, merchants, journalists, professionals, traditional authorities, educated Africans and increasingly active associations. Its newspapers connected local controversies with wider arguments about colonial rule.
The Clifford system magnified Lagos’s political influence by assigning the city three of the country’s four elected Legislative Council seats.
Campaigning therefore became part of political life. Party organisations developed programmes. Newspapers endorsed candidates and attacked rivals. Politicians learned how to mobilise registered electors and build alliances.
These practices did not bring immediate self-government. They did, however, help create an organised political public capable of demanding progressively greater African representation.
That was the larger significance of Herbert Macaulay and Nigerian Nationalism. The politics of Lagos became one of the foundations upon which later territorial nationalist movements could build.
From the NNDP to the NCNC
By the 1940s, Nigerian nationalism was moving beyond the restricted Lagos-centred politics in which Macaulay had first become dominant.
In 1944, Macaulay became the first president of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, the NCNC. Nnamdi Azikiwe was another central figure in the organisation, which brought together numerous political, professional, ethnic, cultural and other associations.
The NCNC represented a much broader phase of Nigerian nationalism. Its ambitions extended far beyond winning a handful of Lagos seats. It sought constitutional change on a territorial scale and became one of the principal nationalist movements of the late colonial period.
Macaulay therefore served as a living connection between two political eras: the highly restricted electoral politics of the 1920s and the broader nationalist mobilisation of the 1940s.
In 1946, while participating in an NCNC political tour, the elderly Macaulay became ill in Kano. He returned to Lagos and died there on 7 May 1946, aged 81.
Nigeria achieved independence on 1 October 1960, fourteen years after his death.
He did not personally lead the country through the final constitutional negotiations that produced independence. His importance lay in helping construct political methods and institutions that later nationalists inherited.
The 2025 Presidential Pardon
More than a century after his 1913 conviction, Macaulay’s colonial record again entered Nigerian public debate.
On 10 October 2025, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu announced a posthumous pardon for Macaulay. The Presidency presented the decision as a correction of a historical injustice committed under colonial rule.
The pardon carried considerable symbolic significance because Macaulay’s conviction had directly affected his eligibility for political office when elective Legislative Council representation began in the 1920s.
The independent Nigerian state was therefore revisiting a colonial judgment that had shaped the career of one of the country’s most influential early nationalists.
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Macaulay’s historical significance rests on the political record he created during his lifetime: organising communities, defending Lagos interests, using journalism as a political weapon and turning a severely restricted electoral system into an opportunity for sustained African political organisation.
Conclusion
Herbert Macaulay did not single-handedly create Nigerian nationalism, and the Clifford Constitution did not suddenly give colonial Nigeria democracy.
The transformation was slower and more complicated.
Political resistance existed before Macaulay. Newspapers and civic organisations had challenged colonial policy before the NNDP. Municipal elections preceded the 1923 Legislative Council contest. Most Nigerians remained completely outside the Clifford electorate.
Yet Macaulay and his associates recognised the possibilities hidden within those restrictions.
Four elected Legislative Council seats were a tiny concession in an authoritarian colonial system. Nevertheless, they required candidates, voters, political programmes, campaigning and organisation. The NNDP used those requirements to demonstrate the effectiveness of party politics.
Macaulay also showed that elected office was only one source of political power. Through journalism, public agitation, traditional alliances, legal controversies and party organisation, he became one of colonial Lagos’s most influential political figures without himself occupying an elected Legislative Council seat.
The road to Nigerian independence cannot be reduced to one politician, one party or one constitutional reform. But the struggles of Lagos in the 1920s helped establish an enduring principle: once Nigerians began organising to demand representation, each limited concession created pressure for something greater.
That process would eventually move far beyond the four seats of 1923.
Author’s Note
Herbert Macaulay’s enduring historical importance lies in the way he connected older forms of Lagos political resistance with the emerging institutions of modern electoral nationalism. His career reminds us that Nigeria’s independence movement developed through decades of argument over land, authority, representation, journalism and constitutional power. The four elective seats introduced under the Clifford system were extremely limited, yet Macaulay and his contemporaries demonstrated how even a narrow political opening could become a platform for organisation, opposition and wider demands for self-government.
References
The Nigeria (Legislative Council) Order in Council, 1922. Made at Buckingham Palace on 21 November 1922 and brought into operation on 1 June 1923.
Omu, Fred I. A. Press and Politics in Nigeria, 1880–1937. London: Longman, 1978.
Tamuno, Tekena N. Nigeria and Elective Representation, 1923–1947. London: Heinemann, 1966.
Tamuno, Tekena N. Herbert Macaulay, Nigerian Patriot. London: Heinemann Educational, 1976.
Dele-Cole, Patrick. Modern and Traditional Elites in the Politics of Lagos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
Amodu Tijani v The Secretary, Southern Provinces, Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, 11 July 1921.
Eshugbayi Eleko v The Officer Administering the Government of Nigeria, Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, 1931.
Independent National Electoral Commission. INEC Strategic Plan 2017–2021, historical account of the development of elective representation in Nigeria.
National Library of Nigeria. Herbert Macaulay biographical record, including his presidency of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons.
State House, Abuja. Presidential statements concerning the posthumous pardon of Herbert Macaulay, October 2025.
