Success Stories
First Professor In Nigeria
Kenneth Onwuka Dike was born on 17th December 1917 in Awka, eastern Nigeria. He attended Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone and also Durham University for his BSc, the University of Aberdeen for his MA, and King’s College London for his PhD. During the 1960s, as a member of the University of Ibadan’s history department, he played a pioneering role in promoting African leadership through scholarly works published in Africa.
Early Life
Kenneth Onwuka Dike was born on 17th December 1917 in Awka, eastern Nigeria. He attended Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone and also Durham University for his BSc, the University of Aberdeen for his MA, and King’s College London for his PhD. During the 1960s, as a member of the University of Ibadan’s history department, he played a pioneering role in promoting African leadership through scholarly works published in Africa.
Career
Dike was a Nigerian educationist, historian and the first Nigerian Vice-Chancellor of the nation’s premier college, the University of Ibadan. During the Nigerian civil war, he moved to Harvard University. He was a founder of the Ibadan School which dominated the writing of the History of Nigeria until the 1970s. He is credited with “having played the leading role in creating a generation of African historians who could interpret their own history without being influenced by Eurocentric approaches.
As the head of the organizing committee of the First International Congress of Africanists in Ghana in 1963, he sought a strengthened meticulous non-colonial-focused African research, publication of research in various languages including indigenous and foreign, so as to introduce native speakers to history and for people to view African history through a common eye. He was the first director of the International School Ibadan.
In 1965 he was elected chairman of the Association of Commonwealth Universities. Ebere Nwaubani argues that Dike was the first modern scholarly proponent of Africanist history. His publications were a watershed in African historiography. Dike has been described as the first African to get a PhD in history.
At the University College of Ibadan, he became the first African professor of history and head of a history department. He founded the Nigerian National Archives and helped in the founding of the Historical Society of Nigeria. His book Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta 1830-1885 dealt with 19th-century economics politics in the Niger Delta. He focused on internal African factors, especially defensive measures undertaken by the delta societies against imperialist penetration. Dike helped create the Ibadan School of African History and promoted the use of oral evidence by African historians. Dike was also the first president of ASUTECH (Anambra State University of Technology, now Nnamdi Azikiwe University).
Publication
His publications include the following:
- Report on the Preservation and Administration of Historical Records in Nigeria (1953),
- Trade and Politics in the Nigeria Delta 1830-1885 (1956),
- A Hundred Years of British Rule in Nigeria (1957),
- The Origins of the Niger Missions (1958)
- A biography entitled, Life and Thoughts of Professor Kenneth O. Dike, was authored by Professor Alexander Animalu.
Personal Life
He had a wife, Ona and they both had five(5) children.
Death
Dr Kenneth O. Dike died in a hospital in Enugu on Oct. 26 1983. He was 65 years old at the time.
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