By Kio Amachree
When I was born in colonial Nigeria, racial segregation was not subtle. It was structured, enforced, and unapologetic.
I came into this world at the European Hospital in Ikoyi, a place that, by design, was not meant for Black children. For a Nigerian child to be born there was extraordinary. It happened because my father was Solicitor General and Acting Attorney General at the time. That position was also why we were permitted to live in Ikoyi at all. We lived on Lugard Avenue in Ikoyi, one of the few Black families allowed to reside there.
What is today the Military Hospital on Awolowo Road was then a whites only institution. Healthcare itself was segregated. Nigerians were excluded as a matter of policy, not circumstance. Exceptions were granted only to a tiny handful whose official status made exclusion inconvenient for the colonial administration. My birth took place inside that contradiction.
Ikoyi was a British enclave. It was designated for Europeans, and Nigerians were not meant to live there. We lived on Lugard Avenue precisely because of my father’s office. Without that role, our presence would have been impossible. The Ikoyi Club 1938, the Boat Club, and other social institutions were British clubs in every sense, British members, British rules, and British attitudes, Nigerian only in labour.
After six o’clock in the evening, Nigerians were expected to leave Ikoyi unless they were domestic servants or members of a very small, tolerated elite. My family was among that handful because of my father’s position. Most Nigerians were required to disappear from the area once the day ended.
I have written before about the racial fights of my youth at the Ikoyi Club during school holidays from Eton College in the 1960s and 1970s. British children, also home on holiday, carried the reflexes of empire with them. Nigerian children were questioned, blocked, humiliated, and provoked. Swimming pools became flashpoints, and so did the polo club. These were not childish scuffles. They were battles over belonging.
The way many of those British children, sons and daughters of middle ranking managers in Nigeria, spoke to Nigerian stewards was brutal. Commands were barked, respect was absent, and dignity was treated as optional. At Tarkwa Bay, the beaches were overwhelmingly white. Nigerians were present, but never meant to feel equal.
What Nigerians today often do not realise is how dramatic the change has been within a single lifetime. Racism was not theoretical. It was daily practice. We fought it wherever it showed itself, in clubs, in social spaces, and sometimes physically. The refrain was constant: you Nigerians need us.
My neighbours in Ikoyi in the sixties, the Lees, like most of the area, were British. I returned home from Eton, one of Britain’s most elite schools, only to face condescension from people who would never have passed through its gates. In seven years, I was never invited into their home, yet they came freely into ours.
That contradiction still strikes me as madness. A Nigerian boy educated at the pinnacle of British privilege, subjected to superiority airs from lower class Britons in post colonial Nigeria simply because a former empire gave them that illusion.
This is not distant history. It is lived memory. And it matters, because understanding what Nigeria was explains why what Nigeria is today should never be taken for granted.
