Sir Kitoye Ajasa was a Nigerian lawyer and legislator during the colonial period. He was conservative, and worked closely with the colonial authorities. He thought that progress would only be possible if Africans adopted European ideas and institutions. Ajasa was one of the leaders of the People's Union, and was the founder of the conservative newspaper the Nigerian Pioneer. He was the first Nigerian to be knighted.

The Saro, or Nigerian Creoles of the 19th and early 20th centuries, were Africans that were emancipated and initially resettled in Freetown, Sierra Leone by the Royal Navy, which, with the West Africa Squadron, enforced the abolition of the international slave trade after the British Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act 1807. Those freedmen who migrated back to Nigeria from Sierra Leone, over several generations starting from the 1830s, became known locally as Saro (elided form of Sierra Leone, from the Yoruba sàró). Consequently, the Saro are culturally descended from Sierra Leone Creoles, with ancestral roots to the Yoruba people of Nigeria.