The Architectural History of Postcolonial West African Universities

The Architectural History of Postcolonial West African Universities

Adefola Toye is a PhD student at the University of Liverpool, co-supervised with The National Archives through a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme. Her research examines university architecture in mid-twentieth-century Nigeria, tracing how campus design and construction shifted as political control transferred from colonial to independent governments.

The post-war period saw a wave of university building across British West Africa, funded through Colonial Development and Welfare Acts and overseen by the Inter-University Council for Higher Education in the Colonies. University College Ibadan, designed by Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, is the most widely studied example. But Adefola’s research moves beyond Ibadan to less well-known institutions: the Nigerian College of Art, Science and Technology (1951) and the four universities established immediately after independence in 1960, including Ahmadu Bello University, Obafemi Awolowo University, and the University of Lagos.

In this post for The National Archives, Adefola discusses how she has used colonial records at Kew to study these institutions and their built environments. She also addresses a problem central to any archival study of this period. As independence approached, British oversight diminished and documentation thinned out. The Colonial Office files become sparser, and the story can only be reconstructed by working across multiple archives and geographies, from the National Archives of Nigeria to the Bodleian Library in Oxford and Michigan State University. Her argument is clear: no single archive can sustain a full account of how these campuses were planned, negotiated, and built. The research demands a multi-archival and transnational approach.

Congratulations to Adefola on successfully defending her PhD on 8th May 2026.

Read the full post here: The architectural history of postcolonial West African universities

Originally published by The National Archives under the Open Government Licence v3.0.