On January 1, 1842, Methodist missionaries established a nursery school in Badagry, Lagos — the first formal school in what would eventually become Nigeria. The country itself would not exist for another 58 years.
The church was building educational infrastructure in the region before colonialism had fully established itself, before the amalgamation of 1914, and before the Nigerian state had the conceptual framework to define itself as a nation. The first Nigerians to receive formal education did so in a church school.
By 1859, the Anglican Church had built Nigeria’s first secondary school — CMS Grammar School in Lagos. By the time the Nigerian state began building its own educational institutions in the twentieth century, the church had already constructed a network of schools across the country that served as the foundation of the national education system.
The question this history raises is not whether the church was involved in building Nigeria. It clearly was, and it was the first institution to do so systematically. The question is why this record is so consistently absent from Nigerian public discourse about the church’s role in national development.