Obafemi Awolowo was born Jeremiah Obafemi Oyeniyi Awolowo on 6 March 1909 in the Ijebu-Remo town of Ikenne, in present-day Ogun State of Nigeria. as the only son of David Shopolu Awolowo, a farmer and sawyer, and Mary Efunyela Awolowo. He had 2 sisters and 1 maternal half-sister. Awolowo’s father was born to a high chief and a member of the Iwarefa, the traditional Osugbo group that ruled Ikenne. In 1896, Awolowo’s father became one of the first Ikenne natives to convert to Christianity. Awolowo’s paternal grandmother, Adefule Awolowo, who Awolowo adored, was a devout worshipper of the Ifá. Adefule, Awolowo’s grandmother, believed that Obafemi was a reincarnation of her father (his great-grandfather). Awolowo’s father’s conversion to Christianity often went at odds with his family’s beliefs. He often challenged worshippers of the god of smallpox, Obaluaye. His father died when on April 8, 1920 of smallpox when Obafemi was about eleven years old. He attended various schools, including Baptist Boys’ High School (BBHS), Abeokuta; and then became a teacher in Abeokuta, after which he qualified as a shorthand typist. Subsequently, he served as a clerk at the Wesley College Ibadan, as well as a correspondent for the Nigerian Times. It was after this that he embarked on various business ventures to help raise funds to travel to the UK for further studies. Following his education at Wesley College, Ibadan, in 1927, he enrolled at the University of London as an External Student and graduated with the degree of Bachelor of Commerce (Hons.).He went to the UK in 1944 to study law at the University of London and was called to the Bar by the Honorable Society of the Inner Temple on 19 November 1946. In 1949 Awolowo founded the Nigerian Tribune, a private Nigerian newspaper, which he used to spread nationalist consciousness among Nigerians.

Awolowo was Nigeria’s foremost federalist. In his Path to Nigerian Freedom (1947) – the first systematic federalist manifesto by a Nigerian politician – he advocated federalism as the only basis for equitable national integration and, as head of the Action Group, he led demands for a federal constitution, which was introduced in the 1954 Lyttleton Constitution, following primarily the model proposed by the Western Region delegation led by him. As premier, he proved to be and was viewed as a man of vision and a dynamic administrator. Awolowo was also the country’s leading social democratic politician. He supported limited public ownership and limited central planning in government. He believed that the state should channel Nigeria’s resources into education and state-led infrastructural development. Controversially, and at considerable expense, he introduced free primary education for all and free health care for children in the Western Region, established the first television service in Africa in 1959, and the Oduduwa Group, all of which were financed from the highly lucrative cocoa industry which was the mainstay of the regional economy.

In 1992, the Obafemi Awolowo Foundation was founded as an independent, non-profit, non-partisan organisation committed to furthering the symbiotic interaction of public policy and relevant scholarship with a view to promoting the overall development of the Nigerian nation. The Foundation was launched by the President of Nigeria at that time, General Ibrahim Babangida, at the Liberty Stadium, Ibadan. However, his most important bequests (styled Awoism) are his exemplary integrity, his welfarism, his contributions to hastening the process of decolonisation and his consistent and reasoned advocacy of federalism-based on ethno-linguistic self-determination and uniting politically strong states-as the best basis for Nigerian unity. Awolowo died peacefully at his Ikenne home, the Efunyela Hall (so named after his mother), on 9 May 1987, at the age of 78 and was laid to rest in Ikenne, amid tributes across political and ethno-religious divides.