Team : Akinsola Akiwowo Bio

Professor Akinsola Akiwowo was born in Calabar, capital of Calabar Province of colonial Nigeria. His father, James Fatayo Akiwowo was an accounting officer of the Bank of British West Africa (BAWA) and his mother Olawale Omolayajo was a homemaker and trader.

He started hiselementary school education at the Church Missionary Society (CMS)'s Saint Paul Elementary School, Breadfruit Street, Lagos and completed my high school education at the Lagos Baptist Academy, Broad Street, Lagos, during World War II, with a Senior Cambridge School Leaving Certificate and Exemption from Matriculation, University of London.

After a few years as a colonial civil servant, he was admitted to Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia in 1950 on an international Rotary Scholarship and graduated Cum Laude in sociology and education. Subsequently, he gained admission to Boston University Graduate School as a Research Fellow at the Institute of African Studies then received a MA degree (sociology and anthropology, August 1954) and a Ph.D. degree (sociology and anthropology, June 1961).

While pursuing the doctorate degree at Boston University that he was introduced to Professor Robert S. Hartman and became an extra-mural student of his theory of the Structure of Value. When Dr. Hartman left Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for the National University of Mexico, they exchanged letters on the subject of his central interest and concern: how the science of value - axiology - could be applied to the discipline of sociology. When he returned to Africa to continue his career at the University of Nigeria, Nsuka, they lost contact. However he continued privately pursuing an interest in the relationship of axiology and sociology. He first publicly pointed out that axiology could potentially contribute to indigenous sociology at his inaugural lecture for the professorial chair in sociology and anthropology before the intellectual community, at the University of Ife, Ile-Ife, Nigeria.

After some years of retirement, he has discovered quite happily that the Robert S. Hartman Institute exists and is most vigorously pursuing the vision and mission of his mentor Robert S. Hartman. He now hopes to spend some of his remaining years to explore Dr. Hartman's assertion that axiology indeed did have a part to play in the intellectual development of sociology as a science of human society.