Deaths: Azikiwe of Nigeria...Mary Nichols

Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, a Penn alumnus who was Nigeria's first president, died May 11 at 91.

Mr. Azikiwe attended Lincoln and Penn, taking his master's degree in philosophy and anthropology here in 1933. A journalist and politician, he led the Nigerian nationalist movement, and was the country's president, serving from 1963 until 1966 when unrest led to a 30-month-long civil war beginning in 1967. Penn gave "Zik of Africa" an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters in 1980, the twentieth anniversary of his country's independence from Great Britain.

He survived his wife, Flora, and is survived by children and grandchildren.

Mary Perot Nichols, who was Penn's director of communications in 1980-83, died on May 21 at the age of 69, of pancreatic cancer. A onetime columnist and city editor of The Village Voice, Ms. Nichols was president of New York's public radio station WNYC when Penn recruited her as communications director, and on leaving Penn she returned to head the station and to serve as a visiting professor of journalism at New York University.

Ms. Nichols is survived by her former husband, Robert; two daughters, Eliza and Kerstin; a son, Duncan; a brother, Charles Perot; and two grandchildren.


Almanac

Volume 42 Number 33
May 21/28, 1996


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