At a Glance
Lagos and the Making of Nigerian Nationalism
Lagos in the early decades of the twentieth century was unlike anywhere else in Nigeria. It was the colonial capital, the seat of the Governor-General, the headquarters of the major British commercial houses, and the country's principal port. It was also, as a consequence of that importance, the place where the contradictions of British colonial rule in Nigeria were most intensely concentrated and most visibly on display. The educated African professional class that the colonial system both required and feared — the lawyers, doctors, journalists, and teachers whose skills sustained the administration while their political awareness threatened its legitimacy — was larger and more organised in Lagos than anywhere else in the country.
The city had a specific social character that shaped its political culture. Indigenous Yoruba families whose roots in Lagos predated British colonisation lived alongside the Saro — descendants of freed slaves who had returned from Sierra Leone, often deeply Christianised and thoroughly educated in British missionary schools, who had been among the first African professionals in colonial Nigeria. Brazilian returnees — descendants of Yoruba slaves transported to Brazil who had come back in the nineteenth century — added another layer of cultural complexity. The colonial economy had layered European commercial and administrative presence over all of this, creating a city in which encounter between African political aspiration and colonial power was constant, unavoidable, and politically productive in ways that shaped the entire subsequent history of Nigerian nationalism.
Adeniran Ogunsanya grew up and came to political consciousness in this environment. The Lagos of his formation was already home to a tradition of organised African political expression that went back to Herbert Macaulay, the grandson of Bishop Ajayi Crowther and the founder of the Nigerian National Democratic Party, who had been running organised political campaigns in Lagos since the 1920s. Macaulay represented the first generation of Lagos nationalism — combative, constitutionalist, focused on specific grievances within the colonial system. By the time Ogunsanya came of age in the late 1930s and 1940s, a new generation was pushing beyond constitutional protest toward the explicit demand for self-government and eventually independence.
The NCNC and the Challenge of Cross-Ethnic Politics
The National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons was founded in 1944 as a broad nationalist coalition, and Nnamdi Azikiwe's ambition for it was explicitly pan-Nigerian — a movement that would transcend the ethnic and regional divisions that British colonial administrative policy had embedded in Nigerian political life through its system of indirect rule and the separation of the country into distinct administrative regions. The ambition was real and the early NCNC did attract support from across ethnic lines, but the structural forces working against it were formidable.
British colonial policy had, whether by design or convenient consequence, organised Nigeria's political administration along lines that reinforced ethnic and regional identities as the primary categories of political belonging. The Northern Region, dominated by the Hausa-Fulani emirates whose traditional authority the British had preserved through indirect rule, had its own political dynamics deeply shaped by the role of the Islamic emirs. The Western Region, heavily Yoruba, had an educated elite whose political ambitions the NCNC's Igbo-identified leadership could not straightforwardly accommodate. The Eastern Region, predominantly Igbo, was Azikiwe's home base and the core of NCNC strength. When Obafemi Awolowo founded the Action Group in 1951 explicitly as a Yoruba cultural and political organisation, he was making a calculated bet that Yoruba political interests were better served by ethnic solidarity than by cross-ethnic nationalist coalition — and in the short term, the bet paid off handsomely.
This was the political landscape in which Adeniran Ogunsanya's commitment to the NCNC as a Yoruba politician was genuinely significant. In Lagos specifically — a city that was not straightforwardly assignable to either the Western Region or any single ethnic constituency — the contest between the NCNC and the Action Group for Yoruba political loyalty was fierce and consequential. Ogunsanya's organisational work in Lagos constituencies, building NCNC support among Yoruba voters who might have been expected to follow Awolowo's lead, directly challenged the Action Group's claim to be the sole legitimate voice of Yoruba political interest.
The Work of Grassroots Organisation
The independence struggle in Nigeria was won not only in the constitutional negotiations between African leaders and British officials in Lagos, London, and at the various constitutional conferences of the 1950s. It was also won — and this is the aspect that national histories consistently underemphasise — in the unglamorous, repetitive work of political organisation at the community level: the ward meetings, the market-stall conversations, the mobilisation of trade unions and market women's associations, the building of local party structures that could turn political commitment into electoral results. Ogunsanya operated in this terrain, and his effectiveness in it was the foundation of his significance within the NCNC.
Lagos's social geography created specific organisational challenges. The city was divided between areas of longer-established settlement — the old Lagos Island communities with their deep-rooted family networks and community associations — and the newer areas of the mainland where migrants from across Yorubaland and beyond had settled and where the social ties of origin-community solidarity were more attenuated. The colonial economy had created its own cross-cutting loyalties through trade union organisation, professional associations, and the various voluntary associations that Lagos's cosmopolitan population sustained. Any politician seeking to build durable support had to navigate all of these simultaneously, appealing to community identity without being trapped by it, addressing economic grievance without being reducible to it, and maintaining the larger nationalist frame while attending to immediate local concerns.
Independence and After: The First Republic
When Nigeria became independent on 1 October 1960, the political landscape that independence created was one that rewarded the regional arithmetic of ethnic mobilisation more than the cross-ethnic nationalist vision that the NCNC had originally represented. The federal structure of independent Nigeria — three regions dominated respectively by the NPC in the North, the NCNC in the East, and the Action Group in the West, with a federal government that required coalition between at least two of them — created incentives for ethnic and regional positioning that progressively narrowed the space for the kind of pan-Nigerian politics that figures like Ogunsanya had tried to build.
The NCNC-NPC coalition that formed the first federal government after independence reflected a pragmatic arrangement between Azikiwe's movement and the Northern People's Congress under the Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, and the federal prime ministership of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. It was a coalition that worked for a time, but the political stresses of the First Republic — the crisis in the Western Region, the disputed federal election of 1964, and the regional census controversies — gradually undermined the legitimacy of the civilian political order and created the conditions for the military intervention of January 1966 that ended it.
Ogunsanya, operating within this system, continued the work of building and maintaining NCNC constituency organisation in Lagos through the First Republic years. The city's political contests remained among the most intensely fought in the country, with the NCNC and Action Group competing for Lagos seats that carried disproportionate symbolic and practical significance. His continued effectiveness in these contests demonstrated that the cross-ethnic political coalition he represented had genuine support in the city even as national politics moved in directions that made such coalitions increasingly difficult to sustain.
Through Military Rule to the Second Republic
The military coups of 1966, the counter-coup, and the civil war that followed — the Biafran War of 1967 to 1970 — transformed the context in which Nigerian politicians of Ogunsanya's generation had to operate. Military rule suspended electoral politics and the party organisations that had been the medium of their careers, but it did not eliminate political activity. The networks of association, the relationships with community leaders and professional associations, the accumulated social capital of years of political organisation — all of these persisted through the military interregnum, available to be reactivated when civilian politics returned.
The Second Republic, inaugurated in 1979 after the Murtala-Obasanjo military administration's managed transition to civilian rule, gave Nigerian politicians of Ogunsanya's generation one more opportunity to participate in democratic politics. The new party system — the NPN, NPP, UPN, GNPP, and PRP that competed in the 1979 elections — reconfigured the alignments of the First Republic without entirely escaping their logic. Ogunsanya remained active in this environment, his long career in Lagos politics providing him with the organisational credibility that sustained political relevance through multiple transitions.
The Meaning of His Career
Adeniran Ogunsanya's significance in the history of Nigerian nationalism is not of the kind that produces the most prominent entries in standard histories. He was not a founding father in the manner of Azikiwe or Awolowo. He did not make the famous speeches or write the defining texts. What he did was the work without which the speeches and texts would have remained rhetorical exercises without political consequence: the building of organisation, the maintenance of coalition, the representation of constituencies whose participation in the nationalist movement required active cultivation rather than passive assumption.
His career also represented something important about the ethnic and regional complexity of Nigerian nationalism — the fact that the movement for independence was never as neatly organised along ethnic lines as British colonial administration preferred to imagine, and that there were always politicians committed to cross-ethnic coalition-building even when the structural incentives ran against it. That commitment was itself a form of political vision, a refusal to accept that Nigeria's colonial administrative boundaries were also the permanent boundaries of its political imagination.