The Nationalist Movement and the Path to Independence

Three developments made organised nationalism possible. Mission and government schools produced a growing professional class of lawyers, teachers, doctors, clerks and journalists. Urban wage labour and trade unionism created constituencies capable of collective action. And the Second World War, in which many Nigerians served, weakened both the finances and the moral claims of empire while raising expectations of political change.

The regional structure introduced in the 1940s and 1950s also shaped the movement. Parties built strongholds in the regions where their leaders' support lay, and negotiation increasingly turned on the balance between regions as much as on the principle of independence itself.

Early activity centred on Lagos, where the Nigerian National Democratic Party contested municipal elections from the 1920s and the Nigerian Youth Movement broadened political organisation in the 1930s. The press, including titles founded by Nnamdi Azikiwe, carried sustained criticism of colonial policy.

Three parties dominated the 1950s. The National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, led by Azikiwe, was strongest in the Eastern Region. The Action Group, led by Obafemi Awolowo, governed the Western Region. The Northern People's Congress, whose leader Ahmadu Bello remained Premier of the Northern Region, was dominant in the north, with Abubakar Tafawa Balewa as its leading federal figure. Other parties, including the Northern Elements Progressive Union led by Aminu Kano, contested the same ground.

Constitutional conferences in London and Lagos through the 1950s negotiated the powers of the regions, the position of minorities within them, revenue allocation and the timetable for independence. The Western and Eastern Regions became self-governing in 1957 and the Northern Region in 1959. A commission examined the fears of minority groups within each region and reported in 1958. Federal elections in December 1959 produced no single majority, and a coalition led by the Northern People's Congress with the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons formed the first independence government, with Balewa as Prime Minister.

Independence was achieved without a war of liberation, and the institutions handed over were those built during colonial rule, including its regional structure.

That structure carried unresolved questions into the new state: how minority communities inside each region would be protected, how revenue from export crops and later from oil would be divided, and how a federation of three unequal regions could be balanced. Those questions dominated the First Republic. The leading figures of the period, among them Azikiwe, Awolowo, Bello, Balewa, Aminu Kano, Herbert Macaulay and Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, remain national reference points, and several are commemorated on currency, in institutions and in place names.