On 6 June 1859, the Church Missionary Society (CMS), the missionary arm of the Anglican Communion, opened CMS Grammar School in Lagos. It was the first secondary school in what is now Nigeria.
The school produced an extraordinary share of the country’s early indigenous professional class — clergy, civil servants, lawyers, doctors and journalists who would shape the political and intellectual life of Nigeria through the colonial period and into independence.
By the time the colonial government began funding secondary education on any meaningful scale in the twentieth century, the church’s grammar-school network had already laid the curricular and institutional template that the state inherited.