Kenneth Dike: Historian and First Nigerian Vice-Chancellor of Ibadan

Recognised by Nkuzify as Patron Teacher of the Year.

World Teachers' Day
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In 1950 a young man from Awka earned a PhD in African history at King's College London. He is described as the first African professionally trained as a historian in the Western tradition.

At that time Africa's past was mostly written from outside, from colonial paperwork. He believed it should be told with African sources and African voices, including the oral traditions that elders carried in memory.

His name was Kenneth Onwuka Dike.

A scholar from Awka

He was born on 17 December 1917 and studied at Dennis Memorial Grammar School in Onitsha, Achimota College in Ghana and Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone. In 1944 a British Council scholarship took him to the University of Aberdeen, where he finished in 1947 with first-class honours, the best in his year.

The professor who built an archive and a school of thought

Back in Nigeria he helped found the National Archives in 1954 and became its first director, so that Nigerians would have their own records to study. At University College Ibadan he became the first African professor of history and the first African to head a history department. He later became its principal, and in the early 1960s, when it became the University of Ibadan, he was its first Nigerian Vice-Chancellor.

He founded the Institute of African Studies in 1962 and reshaped the history curriculum. The group of historians he gathered became known as the Ibadan School of History. They reconstructed precolonial African history from written and oral sources, and he edited the first seven volumes of the Ibadan History series. He taught a generation of historians to interpret their own past.

War, Harvard and home

During the Nigerian Civil War he served as an ambassador for Biafra. After the war he went to Harvard, where he was the first Mellon Professor of African History and chaired the Committee on African Studies. Around 1980 he came home and became the first president of Anambra State University, today Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University. He died on 26 October 1983.

The University of Ibadan named its library after him, and in 1988 the Kenneth Onwuka Dike Center opened in Awka, his hometown.

Why Nkuzify celebrates him

Dike shows that a teacher can change what a whole continent knows about itself. He trained historians, built an archive for them to work in, and led universities so that others could teach. That is the chain Nkuzify believes in: a teacher who teaches teachers.

Read more in Nigeria's Education Heroes: Pioneers, Prizewinners and Unsung Teachers and Nkuzi: The Igbo Pillars of Education, or make a free Thank You card for your own teacher.