About the Founder: Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi
Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi was a pioneer in the study of African history who highlighted native perspectives and the complexities of colonial-era change.
Ajayi was born May 26, 1929 in Ikole Ekiti, western Nigeria, to Christian parents, Ezekiel Adeniyi Ajayi, a postmaster and later private secretary to the area's ruler, and Comfort Bolajoko. Jacob went to Igbobi College, Lagos. He was a foundation student at University College, Ibadan (which became the University of Ibadan) before moving to University College, Leicester (now Leicester University). He gained his Ph.D in African history in 1958 at the University of London.
In 1956, he married Christie Aduke Martins, a teacher and specialist in early childhood education. They had five children, Yetunde, Adeniyi, Funmilayo, Titilola, and Bisola.
Working mainly at the University of Ibadan, Ajayi was a lecturer (1958-63), professor (1963-89), and then emeritus professor. He was a leading light, with the late Kenneth Dike, of the Ibadan School of History, an influential group of Nigerian and foreign academics in the university's history department dedicated to formulating an Afro-centric view of the continent's past. The group started the Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria to counter journals elsewhere that still adhered to colonialist and racist views. He was also a founder of the Ibadan History Series, produced with Longmans during the 1960s, a series of scholarly works providing new perspectives on African history.
From 1972 to 1978, Ajayi was vice-chancellor of the University of Lagos. He took over a demoralized institution; when he left, it was of international standing. He reorganized the ramshackle academic structures and put in place a corruption-proof appointments system. However, collision came with the military government, which faced student protests when it put up fees. The university, being the nearest to government headquarters, was encircled by armed police and a student was shot dead, for no apparent reason. Ajayi’s response was to organize a moving funeral on campus, also to underscore to students that any protest could have far reaching consequences . He was summarily dismissed and went back to Ibadan. A colleague said: "I never heard him raise his voice."
Ajayi was a great believer that historical knowledge should serve the everyday world. He was a major influence in reforming the Nigerian school curriculum to reflect Africa-focused research, working with the examination system and government policymakers, and helping produce appropriate textbooks.
Outside academia, he used his skills as a historian to assist traditional rulers in assessing their post-colonial roles, and occasionally to mediate quietly between state governors, while never becoming involved in partisan politics. He also solved a problem for national census-takers, who had to deal with non-literate people unaware of their age; he prepared a special handbook of important historical events, so that if, for instance, someone said she was born in the year of influenza, they could record 1918. He played an active role in many international bodies, including the International Africa Institute in London where he became the first African to chair this organization, which was established in 1926 for the study of African culture and languages and had Lord Lugard as its first chairman.
Legacy
Ajayi was a trailblazer in the field of African history. Before Ajayi, historians of Africa generally privileged the points of view of outsiders to the continent—colonialists, missionaries and other non-native-Africans. Ajayi collaborated with Ian Espie on a book called A Thousand Years of West African History (1965), which educators still use today. The book drew from the archaeological record and from primary African sources, many of them in Arabic. It remains in use by teachers and students today.
Ajayi charted a new course for African historiography by offering a balanced treatment of both western and African perspectives. In his book Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841-91 (1964), Ajayi asserted that the century of colonialism, before Nigeria became independent in 1960, was actually a brief period in history, and that the colonizers worked through established African institutions rather than setting up their own structures.
Ajayi also wrote a biography of Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the first African bishop in the Anglican Church, entitled A Patriot to the Core. In it, Ajayi showed that the advent of Nigerian Christianity created a new class of elites, Africans educated by the West, whose aims often diverged from those of the established leadership. In a paper for theJournal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, published in 1960, he contended that the 19th century saw an early form of nationalism germinating in this elite class.
As dedicated as he was to emphasizing identity for Nigerian and African people, he was also intent on not glorifying the past. In 2010, he was one of eight Nigerian historians to contribute to Slavery and Slave Trade in Nigeria, which made the case that the traditional academic focus on the external slave trade, particularly the trans-Atlantic trade to Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean had underplayed the importance of the much older indigenous trans-Saharan and trans-Indian Ocean trades.
In this work, as in others, Ajayi was innovative in his use of a combination of oral and written history, which he was meticulous in evaluating. This allowed him to present African voices authoritatively to counterbalance the European and American perspective. Ajayi once said: "People of my generation learned how Britannia ruled the world," and he made it his life's work to change that.
Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi died August 9, 2014. He was eulogized by the Nigerian president, Goodluck Jonathan, as having "a lasting place of honor as one of Africa's greatest historians." His contribution was recognized by a state funeral in Nigeria.
OUR PEOPLE
Board of Trustees
Christie Ade Ajayi
Christie Ade Ajayi (born 1930) is a Nigerian specialist in early childhood education. She is the author of various English-language books for young children, and has made a point of writing stories with a Nigerian setting that her readers can relate to. As well as having long experience of teaching she has been active in a number of organisations concerned with children and education.
Ade Ajayi's experience in early years teaching led to a concern "with the learning needs of Nigerian children". She was motivated to encourage preschoolers and beginner readers by offering them books that reflected their own experience and culture. While enjoying stories and pictures of West African characters they could enlarge their vocabulary and develop reading skills.
Founder of the Ibadan branch of the World Organization for Early Childhood Education (OMEP: Organisation Mondiale Pour L'Éducation Préscolaire) in 1986. As a long-standing honorary member of OMEP she helped host their 2009 world assembly in Lagos. She was Chairman of the Nursery School Board of the University of Lagos, a Consultant in Early Childhood Education at the University of Ibadan. In 1993 the International Journal of Early Childhood published her article on 'Collaboration with other international agencies in community development programmes: The Nigerian experience.
Professor Ayodele Francis Ogunye
Ayodele Francis Ogunye (FAEng) retired in 1995 as the first Professor in Chemical Engineering at the University of Lagos (UNILAG). He studied Chemical Engineering at Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London 1963/66 and the University of Waterloo, Canada 1966/69. He returned to Nigeria in September 1970 after an eighth month post-doctoral distinction fellowship to lecture chemical engineering at the University of Ife now Obafemi Awolowo University. Later in August 1973, he started the new department at UNILAG under Prof J.F Ade Ajayi as Vice-Chancellor. The department nurtured by Ade Ajayi is today the number one in teaching and research in Chemical Engineering in the country. He is the current President of the Nigerian Academy of Engineering.
Professor Jacob Olupona
Jacob K. Olupona is a scholar of indigenous African religions who came to Harvard after serving as a professor at the University of California, Davis.
He is working on a study of the religious practices of the estimated one million Africans who have emigrated to the United States over the last 40 years, examining in particular several populations that remain relatively invisible in the American religious landscape: "reverse missionaries" who have come to the U.S. to establish churches, African Pentecostals in American congregations, American branches of independent African churches, and indigenous African religious communities in the U.S. His earlier research include African spirituality and ritual practices, spirit possession, Pentecostalism, Yoruba festivals, animal symbolism, icons, phenomenology, and religious pluralism in Africa and the Americas. Olupona has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Ford Foundation, the Davis Humanities Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Getty Foundation. He has served on the editorial boards of three journals and as president of the African Association for the Study of Religion. In 2000, Olupona received an honorary doctorate in divinity from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
Professor Michael Omolewa
Michael Omolewa, (OON), Emeritus Professor at the University of Ibadan, was Editorial Assistant to Professor Ade Ajayi, Editor of Volume 6 of the UNESCO General History of Africa. he was Head of the Department of Adult Education, Dean of Faculty of Education of the University of Ibadan, and Chairman of the Committee of Deans of the Faculties of Education of Nigerian Universities. He served as a Nigeria's Ambassador and Permanent Delegate to UNESCO for a decade, President of the 32nd session of General Conference of UNESCO, member of the executive council of the International Standing Conference of the History of Education, member of the Government Advisory Committee of the International Baccalaureate Organisation, Vice-Chair of the International Bureau of Education in Switzerland, and Deputy Chair of the Governing Board of the Commonwealth of Learning in Canada. He is currently Emeritus Professor of History at Babcock University, Nigeria, and serves on the Council of the International African Institute, UK.
Professor Kyari Mohammed
Kyari Mohammed, educated at the Universities of Maiduguri and Ibadan, is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for Peace and Security Studies at the Modibbo Adama University of Technology, Yola. Professor Mohammed is part of the last generation of students supervised by Emeritus Professor J.F Ade Ajayi in the 1990s. He has published several works including Borno in the Rabih Years, 1893 - 1901 (2006) and several journal articles and book chapters thus establishing him as a leading scholar on Borno and the Central Bilad as -Sudan. Kyari Mohammed is currently working on a full length monograph on the history and the doctrine of the militant Boko Haram movement.
Richard Fardon
Richard Fardon is a social anthropologist and ethnographer of West Africa whose interest in Cameroon and Nigeria stretches back to his doctoral studies in the 1970s. Since then he has published monographs on a variety of aspects of West African society and culture, including politics, history, religion and art.
He was appointed to a Chair of West African Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, in 1996, and elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2004. He is currently Head of the SOAS Doctoral School.
William Rea
William Rea is senior lecturer in the art history of Africa at the University of Leeds. He was born in Ibadan, where his father worked with Professor Ajayi on various books for Longmans. He has conducted fieldwork in Ikole at various times since 1990. He is currently working on popular culture and creative industry in Nigeria as well as developing a project on art and culture in post-Biafra Nigeria.
Yetunde Aina
Yetunde Aina (nee Ade Ajayi), is CEO of Jadeas Trust. By training, a London School of Economics (LSE) and Cambridge - educated economist cum lawyer, she is a Cultural Advocate by calling.
Niyi Ade Ajayi
Niyi Ade Ajayi is a consultant paediatric surgeon at King's College Hospital, London with an interest in minimal access surgery. He is active in global surgery capacity building and is on the Executive Committee on the Pan-African Association of Paediatric Surgeons.
