"Rejoice with me, oh ye sports lovers of Nigeria," wrote a special correspondent after Ifeajuna had won the high jump.

"Who among our people did not weep for sheer joy when Nigeria came uppermost, beating all whites and blacks together?"

Ifeajuna was the first black African to win an individual gold medal in any sport at any major multi-sport Games.

No wonder he was given a hero's welcome when he returned home, and his picture adorned the cover of school exercise books throughout the land.

Ifeajuna would remain Nigeria's only gold medallist, in Commonwealth or Olympic sport, until 1966.

The next year, on September 25, 1967, he would be dead, shot by firing squad as a crowd of thousands watched.

He was no hero then, to those who hissed as he was tied to a stake.

But some historians have since taken a different view as they look back on the remarkable life, and death, of Emmanuel Ifeajuna.

Nigerians excelled in the high jump in the 1950s, when three of them finished in the top 20 at the Helsinki 1952 Olympic Games.

Ifeajuna was not a contender for the 1954 team for Vancouver until, as a 20-year-old outsider, he surprised everybody at the national championships with a jump of 6ft 5.5in and earned his place on the boat.

The high jump was on the first day and Ifeajuna wore only one shoe, on his left foot.

A correspondent wrote: "In his take-off stride his leading leg was flexed to an angle quite beyond anything ever seen but he retrieved position with a fantastic spring and soared upwards as if plucked by some external agency."

Ifeajuna cleared 6ft 8in to set a Games and British Empire record. That leap - just over 2.03 metres - would have been good enough for a silver medal in Helsinki two years earlier.

Soon after his return home, Ifeajuna's sporting career was finished - he was off to study at Ibadan University, he married a year later and then joined the army.

Why did the record-breaking champion stop competing?

"From October, 1954, when he enrolled at Ibadan, he never trained," said his old friend Chief Emeka Anyaoku, nearly 60 years later.

"He never had a coach - only his games master at grammar school - and there were no facilities at the university. He simply stopped.

"He seemed content with celebrating his gold medal.

"He was so gifted, he just did it all himself. Jumping barefoot, or with one shoe, was not unusual where we came from."

Anyaoku joined the Commonwealth Secretariat in 1966, the year when Ifeajuna and others led an attempted coup in Nigeria.

The coup attempt failed but Ifeajuna esacaped and would later return to fight in the Nigerian Civil War on the side of the secessionist state of Biafra.

Anyaoku rose to the highest office in the Commonwealth, secretary general, in 1990.

"I was devastated when I heard the news of the execution," he said.

Ifeajuna was all but written out of Nigeria's sporting history, but Anyaoku said: "The history of the civil war still evokes a two-sided argument.

"He is a hero to many people, though they would more readily talk about his gold medal than his involvement in the war.

"There are people who think he was unjustifiably executed and others who believe the opposite."

According to an official but disputed police report, Ifeajuna pulled the trigger when Nigeria's first Prime Minister, Tafawa Balewa, was shot and killed during the coup attempt.

Ifeajuna escaped to Ghana, dressed as a woman.

Twenty months later he was back, fighting for the persecuted Igbo people of eastern Nigeria in the civil war that broke out as a consequence of the coup attempt.

Ifeajuna and three fellow officers were accused by their own leader, General Emeka Ojukwu, of plotting against him and the breakaway Republic of Biafra.

They denied charges of treason and said they were trying to save lives and their country by negotiating an early ceasefire with the Federal Government and reuniting Nigeria.

They failed, and they were all executed.