[1] Ade Ajayi favours the use of historical continuity more often than focusing on events only as powerful agents of change that can move the basic foundations of cultures and mould them into new ones.
[3] He also employs a less passionate style in his works, especially in his early writings, using subtle criticism of controversial issues of the times.
[4] Ajayi was born in Ikole-Ekiti on 26 May 1929,[5] his father was a personal assistant of the Oba of Ikole during the era of Native Authorities.
Thereafter, he gained admission into the college, and equipped with a scholarship from the Ikole Ekiti Native authority, he went to Lagos for secondary education.
After completing his studies at Igbobi, he gained admission to the University of Ibadan, where he was to pick between History, Latin or English for his degree.
[7] In 1952, he travelled abroad and studied at Leicester University, under the tutelage of Professor Jack Simmons, a brilliant Oxford-trained historian.
The missionaries also established schools that created a new educated class who later broke with the Europeans and fought for a new social and political order.
However, the new order embraced European contemporary social, political and economic structures as ideals of the new society.