Before independence: The first Nigerians to earn university degrees abroad and how they shaped a nation

In 1840, British missionaries introduced the first form of Western education to Nigerian soil with a primary school. Nine years later, in 1859, the first Anglican Church Missionary Society Grammar School opened in Lagos, becoming the country's first secondary school.

But some Nigerians didn't wait for the system to come to them. Long before independence was even a conversation, a small number made their way abroad, earned university degrees, and came back to do something with them.

Before there was a Nigeria, a prince from the Warri Kingdom became the first university graduate in Sub-Saharan Africa. Born Prince Oyeomasan, he was home-schooled in Ode-Itsekiri and could already read and write Portuguese before he left.

Around 1600, his father sent him to Portugal, where he studied theology at the Collégio de São Jerónimo in Coimbra and entered its university system. He returned in 1611 with a degree and a Portuguese wife.

He became the 7th Olu of Warri around 1623. His education reshaped the kingdom's relationship with Portugal, consolidated Catholicism within the court, and introduced European governance structures into the Itsekiri royal tradition.

Christopher and Oguntola were born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, to an Ijesha father from Ilesa and an Egba mother from Abeokuta, sons of a liberated slave who made it back to West Africa and raised two sons who would each leave a permanent mark on colonial Nigeria.

Christopher went first. He studied law at the Inner Temple in London and was called to the English bar on November 17, 1879, becoming the first indigenous Nigerian lawyer. He returned to practice in Lagos Colony.

He served as Chairman of the Nigerian Bar Association from 1900 to 1915, challenged colonial sedition ordinances that suppressed press freedom, and in 1910, encouraged a young Herbert Macaulay to convene the meeting that launched his organised resistance.

His younger brother, Oguntola, went to Scotland. He obtained his medical qualifications from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow in 1895 and returned to Lagos Colony as an Assistant Colonial Surgeon in 1896.

He organised the first public dispensary in 1901, fought slum clearance, trained midwives scientifically, identified overcrowding and poor ventilation as drivers of a tuberculosis epidemic in 1918, and led the successful fight against bubonic plague in Lagos in 1924.

He also converted the dispensary into what became the Massey Street Hospital. The road behind it was named Sapara Avenue in his honour.

Olayinka Herbert Samuel Heelas Badmus Macaulay was born in Lagos in 1864 to a family with roots tied to Nigerian history itself. His grandfather was Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the first African Anglican bishop. His father founded CMS Grammar School, Nigeria's first secondary school.

The colonial government awarded him a scholarship in 1890 to study civil engineering in Plymouth. He returned in 1894 as the first Nigerian to qualify as a civil engineer and took up a position as Crown land inspector.

However, what came next was not what the British had planned for him.

He exposed European corruption in railway finances in 1908. He led an agitation against water rates in 1915. He took the cases of chiefs whose land had been seized all the way to the Privy Council in London and won, forcing the colonial government to pay compensation.

He founded Nigeria's first political party in 1923 and co-founded the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons in 1944. He died in 1946, weeks into a political tour, still fighting.

Her father, Omoba Eric Olawolu Moore, made an unusual decision for his time; rather than prepare his daughter for marriage, he took her abroad for education.

She attended Vassar College in New York, Potway College in Reading, and St. Hugh's College, Oxford. By 1935, at 22, she graduated with a degree in Education and English, becoming the first Black African woman to earn a degree from Oxford.

She came straight back to Nigeria.

Within months, she was teaching at Queens College, Lagos. She helped establish two girls' schools, was appointed Secretary of the Western Region Scholarship Board, and in 1958 became the first president of Nigeria's National Council of Women's Societies. She kept working until her death in 2002, aged 89.

Not a name that gets mentioned enough. Wachuku matriculated at Trinity College Dublin in 1939, became the first African medallist and laureate in Oratory there, and was called to the Irish bar in November 1944, graduating with a first-class BA in Legal Science with prizes in Roman Law, Constitutional and Criminal Law.

He returned to Nigeria in 1947, became the first Speaker of the Nigerian House of Representatives, and later the first Nigerian Ambassador to the United Nations.

But his most overlooked act came in 1963, when, as Foreign Affairs Minister, he intervened with the South African government and helped save Nelson Mandela and his co-accused from the death penalty at the Rivonia Trial.

Azikiwe earned a BA from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1930, an MA in 1932, and an MS from the University of Pennsylvania in 1933.

He returned to Africa in 1934, was charged with sedition in the Gold Coast for a newspaper article, won on appeal, and came back to Nigeria in 1937 with a sharper sense of purpose.

He built a media network of five newspapers worth over two million dollars and used every editorial to push for direct elections, African control of the civil service, and the end of British rule. By 1960, Nigeria was independent. By 1963, Azikiwe was its first president.

A Lagos prince who attended Methodist Boys' High School and King's College before travelling to the University of Glasgow, where he graduated MB ChB in 1932, took a Diploma in Public Health in 1935, and completed his MD in 1939.

He returned to Nigeria, established the Infectious Disease Hospital in Lagos, and helped found what became the Nigerian Red Cross Society.

He was also one of the earliest voices for community-based healthcare, running a programme in Ilora, Oyo State, where he insisted residents be involved in every stage of decision-making about their own care. That idea was considered radical in the 1950s. It is standard practice now.

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