Sir Kitoye Ajasa: The first knighted Nigerian who devoted his newspaper to sensitize Nigerians when 1918 epidemic was killing thousands

The role of mass media in a time of crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic presently threatening global peace, cannot be overemphasized. From time immemorial, the mass media has been instrumental in setting agenda and making people act in a desired way. Harold Laswell’s Magic Bullet Theory of Mass Media which explains how media controls what the audience views and listens to and the effects, aptly describes the impact of media in a time like this. By constantly giving prominence to a topic, the media creates a uniform thinking among people to make them take a particular action.

During the 1918 influenza epidemic, which killed an estimated half a million people in Nigeria and infected a third of the world’s population, the people of that era had no access to the common means of communication we now have in 2020. They only had very few newspapers and the town criers who disseminated information across communities, unarguably, their reach would be very minimal compared to the reach of the numerous means of communication in the world today. Nigeria didn’t have a radio and television station until 1939 and 1959 respectively. The first television station in the country, the Western Nigerian Government Broadcasting Corporation (WNTV) began broadcasting on October 31 1959, while the first radio station was established in Ibadan in 1939.

During the epidemic, the major form of mass communication available to British colonial administrators at the front line of battling the influenza in Nigeria was the newspaper. At that time they were already overwhelmed by the exponential rise in the number of casualties and had to seek local help from the natives. The populace on their own part were not complying with measures put in place to address the epidemic, they didn’t trust the colonialists and believed their actions had sinister motives. An example is the manner which many Lagos residents fled from the colony when safety officers started visiting homes to ascertain the level of casualty and disinfect houses. It was difficult to make the natives comply with safety measures.

While all the newspaper at that time had a common goal – to condemn colonialism and lead a call for independence, The Nigerian Pioneer owned by Sir Kitoye Ajasa towed a different path which earned it the tag of official mouthpiece of the British colonial government. Despite the labelling, the newspaper stood out in its reportage which helped to sensitize the populace when Spanish flu was wiping away thousands of Nigerians between 1918 and 1919. The message became more important than the messenger during the crisis.

Sir Kitoye Ajasa was a legal practitioner, politician and newspaper publisher born on August 10 1866. He was one of the leaders of the first political party in Nigeria – the People’s Union, and founded the Nigerian Pioneer newspaper in 1914.

He enjoyed a cordial friendship with the colonialists and was a friend of Nigeria’s Governor-General, Lord Lugard who reportedly facilitated his knighthood. Kitoye Ajasa was the son of Thomas Benjamin Macaulay from a branch of the Saro family who migrated to Lagos from Ajase in Dahomey after gaining freedom from a slave ship in Sierra Leone.

He studied at CMS Grammar School, Lagos before moving to Dulwich College in London and later studied to become a qualified lawyer at the Middle Temple (London), where he was called to the Bar in 1893 before returning to Lagos to begin his legal practice. He married Oyinkan Moore – the granddaughter of the celebrated Abeokuta trader Osanyintade Williams. After spending 12 years in London where he qualified as a lawyer, Ajasa decided to drop his original name Edmund Macaulay and adopted Kitoye Ajasa.

In 1906, he became an unofficial member of the Legislative Council, and in 1914 was made a member of the Nigerian Council of Governor-General Frederick Lugard. He was widely criticised by many nationalists and his contemporaries for his idiosyncrasies and advocacy for the full adoption of European ideas and institutions as the fastest way to make progress.

“We in West Africa have been for generations under British rule and with that rule we are satisfied,” he said on September 9, 1917. In 1923, he explained that his motive for founding the Nigerian Pioneer newspaper was “to interpret thoroughly and accurately the Government to the people and the people to the Government”.

In their description of the role of Ajasa’s newspaper, Toyin Falola and Ann Genova wrote in their book ‘Historical Dictionary of Nigeria’: “The Nigerian Pioneer, established by Sir Kitoyi Ajasa and distributed from Lagos from 1914 to 1934, had little success. On the one hand, it was criticized for appearing pro-government; on the other, it was praised for thoroughly interpreting government policy to its readers.”

As a good ally of the British colonialists, when the government met stiff restriction from the natives during a house-to-house visit as part of measures to combat the 1918 epidemic, the support of Kitoyi Ajasa was solicited by the government to use his newspaper to publicise the scheme and sensitize the people.

“The Nigerian Pioneer newspaper from 1918–1919 devoted more space to the epidemic than any other news medium in the Lagos colony,” Jimoh Mufutau Oluwasegun wrote in the Journal of Asian and African Studies. “After much publicity made by the government by means of press reports and advertisement, more natives became sympathetic with the government attempts at controlling the disease and volunteered to assist them in their action.”

His fraternity with the British colonialists would later make him the first Nigerian to be knighted by the British Empire when he was made a knight in the 1928 Birthday Honours, four years before then he had been conferred with an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1924.

He was a legislator until 1933 and also became a Judge of the High Court of Lagos. He died in 1937. Kitoye Ajasa’s daughter Oyinkan Abayomi was a prominent educator and feminist who founded the Nigerian Women’s Party which advocated for equal rights for women.

This story was first published on May 4, 2020.

Cover design by Tobi Yinka.