Founded in 1859 with just £50, CMS Grammar School Lagos became Nigeria’s first secondary school. Its story is a lesson in resilience for anyone starting something new.

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In the orchestra of existence, some institutions play like symphonies — genius and grit blended into a sound that carries long after the founders are gone. On a recent visit to Lagos, we passed through one of them: CMS Grammar School, the oldest secondary school in Nigeria.

A seed of £50

Founded on June 6, 1859, by the Church Missionary Society, CMS Grammar School became the cradle of post-primary education in Nigeria. The beginning was almost impossibly small. A £50 gift from the Lagos merchant James Pinson Labulo Davies bought the school’s first books and equipment. It opened as a boarding school with just six boys, all living together in a single house, following a demanding curriculum of Latin, Greek, English, and Mathematics.

From that one house, a nation’s educated class began to take shape.

The legacy that kept blooming

The alumni read like a roll call of Nigerian history. Herbert Macaulay, the nationalist and political pioneer. Ernest Shonekan, who briefly led Nigeria’s Interim National Government. F. R. A. Williams, the country’s first Senior Advocate of Nigeria. Boys who arrived as students left as builders of a country.

The school’s motto holds the whole story in three Latin words: Nisi Dominus Frustra — “Without God, we labour in vain.” More than 165 years later, CMS Grammar School still stands, offering both day and full boarding.

Why beginnings are supposed to be hard

Stand in front of a place like this and two truths become plain: legacies matter, and it is worth investing in things that may outlive you.

The founders did not begin with certainty. They began with £50, six boys, and one house — and persevered through the chaos that founding anything always brings. That is the quiet lesson of every enduring thing. The storm at the start is not a sign you chose wrong. It is the pressure that teaches the seed to bloom on its own, centuries later.

So if you are at the beginning — starting a school, launching a brand, writing your first grant, planting something you may never see fully grown — take heart from a small house in Lagos. Keep embracing the storms every beginning brings. In time, like CMS Grammar School, you will surely deserve the rainbows that follow.

Keep this.