Abdul Rahman Mahdi was born in Nigeria, in1919, of Yoruba descent. He attended the Public Works Department Training School in Lagos, Nigeria and by 1953 was working as an architectural draughtsman in Freetown, Sierra Leone. He travelled to the UK in May of the same year, landing at Liverpool docks under the aegis of the Crown Agents for the Colonies. He then appears to have worked at an architectural practice in London during the day, whilst attending evening classes at the Hammersmith School of Building and Arts and Crafts. He completed his RIBA final examination, qualifying in 1957 and returning to Sierra Leone in March of that year, together with his wife and 2-year-old son. He gained a position in the Ministry of Works, in Freetown, under Chief Architect Joseph Ransford Jarrett-Yaskey, who had graduated from the Department of Tropical Architecture, run by the Architectural Association (AA), in London, in 1955. It was possibly under Jarrett-Yaskey’s influence that Mahdi himself took the opportunity, in 1964, to return to the UK and enroll on the same postgraduate programme at the AA, taking the option of attending the Department’s Educational Building course. Upon completion of his studies, it appears Mahdi returned once more to the Ministry of Works, in Freetown, where he was almost immediately engaged upon work related to the plans for the new Fourah Bay College. Further details of his subsequent career are not yet known to us, beyond the fact that he was still employed at the Ministry in 1979.
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