Know Your Heroes and Heroines

Olayinka Macaulay Badmus was born in Lagos on November 14, 1864 to Thomas Babington Macaulay and Abigail Crowther. They were children of people who were captured from what is now present day Nigeria. They had settled in Sierra Leone but eventually returned to present day Nigeria. Thomas Babington Macaulay was one of the sons of Ojo Oriare while Abigail Crowther was the daughter of Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the first African Bishop of the Niger territory. Thomas Babington Macaulay was the founder of the first secondary school in Nigeria, the CMS Grammar School, Lagos.

Herbert Macaulay was an unlikely champion of the masses and was one of the first Nigerian nationalists and for most of his life, a strong opponent of British rule in Nigeria. In 1908, he exposed European corruption in the handling of railway finances and in 1919 he argued successfully for the Chiefs whose land had been taken by the British in front of the Privy council in London. As a result, the colonial government was forced to pay compensation to the chiefs. In retaliation for this and other activities of his, Macaulay got jailed twice by the British.

He co-founded the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, NCNC, together with another nationalist, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe and became its president. The party was designed to bring together Nigerians of all ethnic and religious groups to ask for independence. Herbert Macaulay later died and was buried at Ikoyi cemetery in Lagos on May 11, 1946.