Nigeria's first communications technology arrived not by cable but in a crate. In December 1846 the Church Missionary Society missionary Henry Townsend unloaded a hand-operated Albion iron press at Abeokuta — bought in London for £40 and shipped via Badagry — and set it up in a thatched outbuilding next to the Ake mission. The press first printed Yoruba primers and Scripture portions translated by Townsend's colleague Samuel Ajayi Crowther. Thirteen years later, on 3 December 1859, the same press produced Iwe Irohin fun awon Ara Egba ati Yoruba ('Newspaper for the Egba and Yoruba people') — the first newspaper printed in any African language south of the Sahara. It cost 120 cowries, came out fortnightly, and ran until the 1867 Ifole uprising at Abeokuta, when Egba traditionalists expelled the missionaries and smashed the press.
The technology then spread southward through the merchant elite of Lagos. Robert Campbell, a Jamaican-Scottish print foreman who had toured the Niger with Martin Delany in 1859, founded The Anglo-African in Lagos in 1863 — the colony's first English-language paper. By 1880 Lagos had four competing weeklies (Lagos Times, Lagos Observer, Mirror, Eagle). The 1903 founding of the Lagos Standard and Herbert Macaulay's Lagos Daily News in 1925 made Nigerian journalism a political weapon a full generation before broadcasting arrived; Nnamdi Azikiwe's West African Pilot (22 Nov 1937) industrialised it, running rotary presses imported from Linotype Ltd of Manchester and chains of provincial titles in Onitsha, Ibadan, Kano, Port Harcourt and Jos.
The printing press is the technology Nigeria adopted earliest relative to Britain — a lag of barely a decade behind the cheap iron-press revolution of the 1830s — and the only one where Africans were the operators from day one. Crowther set the type. Townsend cranked the press. The lag would never be that short again.
Adoption lag vs the metropole: UK first mechanical press (Stanhope) 1800 → Nigeria 1846 = 46 years. UK first vernacular newspaper readership at scale c. 1830 → Iwe Irohin 1859 = 29 years. Of the seven communications technologies in this series, the press is the *only* one where Nigeria was inside a single generation of the British curve.