Communiqué 87: Archiving wants to interrupt Nigeria’s historical patterns of repetition

With 200,000 pages of old newspapers scanned and digitised, Archiving is expanding its focus to interpretation and storytelling.

Why this matters

1. In a country where history was once erased from schools, projects like Archiving safeguard collective memory and help Nigerians reconnect with their past.

2. Archiving is moving beyond preservation to interpretation—transforming static records into living knowledge that can break cycles of political, social, and economic mistakes.

3. With growing demand for digitised archives in AI, research, and cultural storytelling, Archiving could position Nigeria firmly within the global memory and knowledge economy.

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1. The August Event

“We will devote the next two years to studying and understanding Nigeria’s cycle of repetition and then try to figure out how to interrupt it.”

This was Fu’ad Lawal, co-founder and executive director of Archiving, a non-profit organisation working to digitise old Nigerian newspapers and magazines, laying out the focus for the next phase of the project, pointedly titled “The More Things Change,” at the maiden edition of its flagship event, The August Event.

Held inside a Lagos art gallery, the two-day event was equal parts Apple-style showcase of new products, graduation ceremony for the inaugural cohort of the Archiving Fellowship, and exhibition of the fellows’ work.

Since its launch in 2023, Archiving has captured the zeitgeist with its mission to preserve Nigerian history by scanning old newspapers. It has grown from a crowdfunded experiment into a full-scale non-profit safeguarding the country’s collective memory.

But for much of its existence, the project has been focused on preservation: scanning old newspapers and making them available to the public. The next act is about interpretation: building the tools and frameworks to uncover the patterns buried in those archives. The idea is simple: if you can trace how crises like fuel subsidies, currency devaluations, or ethnic tensions have recurred across decades, then you create the possibility of breaking the cycle rather than repeating it.

And Nigeria, for all its potential, is a country so prone to repeating historical mistakes that this project is almost a no-brainer. To make this more imperative, Nigeria took out “History” from its list of school subjects in 1982 and only began reintroducing it in the 2010s.

2. The foundations of a national archive

In October 2023, Archiving went live with its first collection: digitised copies of PM News newspapers. For the first time, Nigerians could digitally access old newspapers. But the journey to that milestone was anything but linear.

Archiving started in 2020 with Fu’ad Lawal, former editor-in-chief of the youth and pop culture publication Zikoko, who had struggled to find historical context for contemporary stories. That frustration sparked a seemingly impossible mission: to locate and archive one Nigerian newspaper for every day between 1960 and 2010. Within five months, with the help of friends, he had tracked down 95% of the target collection.

However, finding the papers was only the beginning. Navigating Nigeria’s government bureaucracy to register as a non-profit, without which Archiving could not access national archives and crowdfunding to secure an industrial-grade scanner, proved much harder. Add in a global supply-chain crisis, which delayed the arrival of the scanner that the entire project rested upon, and immigration bottlenecks. Things were looking dire. But, against the odds, Archiving pushed through, scanned its first pages in April 2023 and launched its searchable archive six months later.

3. How memory projects evolve

Many studies have examined the development of memory projects like Archiving, from Jan Assmann’s cultural memory theory to Maurice Halbwachs’ idea of collective memory. Broadly, the evolution of such projects tends to follow five stages.

The first stage is conception, when a community, institution, or individual recognises the urgency of safeguarding a story, tradition, or experience at risk of being forgotten. This spark often comes from cultural loss, political upheaval, or a desire to preserve identity.

Next is research and documentation, where testimonies, artefacts, and records are gathered.

The third stage, preservation and archiving, ensures materials are stored securely and made accessible—whether through physical repositories like museums and libraries or digital platforms and databases.

Once preserved, the project moves to interpretation and storytelling. Here, memory is given context and shared meaning through exhibitions, documentaries, performances, or online narratives that frame how audiences understand the past.

The fifth step is public engagement and education, where memory becomes active in schools, communities, and public debates. This stage ensures it informs identity and dialogue, not just storage.

Archiving launched at a critical moment in Nigeria’s history. The current president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, had just taken office following an election riddled with irregularities, and public distrust was high. Almost immediately, the platform’s search data reflected the anxieties of the time. “When we launched, the number one search query was Tinubu. We were scared the government was going to shut us down, but that didn’t happen,” Lawal recalled.

But politics was not the only obsession driving people into the archives. Sport was another major subject of interest. Requests poured in from as far afield as Brazil, where researchers and fans wanted records of Brazilian football clubs touring Nigeria in the 1980s.

No matter how vast a newspaper archive is, it is only as powerful as the meaning people can extract from it. Nigerians searching for “Tinubu” were not simply looking for headlines but patterns of behaviour to understand their new president: what he had said in the past, what had been said about him, and the scandals he had been involved in. These early queries pointed to Archiving’s need to move to the next stage in the evolution process: interpretation.

4. Giving context to the archives

In August 2024, Archiving launched The Archivist, a quarterly digital publication designed to help interpret the vast trove of data it was gathering. Shortly after, it introduced the inaugural Archiving Fellowship, aimed at multi-disciplinary creators eager to use the archives to reinterpret Nigerian history across formats. Samson Toromade, former editor-in-chief of Pulse Nigeria, joined the team as head of storytelling and community to lead this new phase.

The fellowship’s projects premiered at The August Event. They included No Way Home: The Genesis of the Exodus, a documentary on Nigerian migration patterns; The Ordinary Nigerians Podcast, chronicling everyday lives from pre-amalgamation to post-independence; Yellow Sunset, an animated short about the Nigerian Civil War; and Documenting the Stories Behind Black Orpheus, a series of essays on Nigeria’s first literary magazine.

But Archiving’s ambitions extend beyond the fellowship. The platform is also launching Context by Archiving, an AI chatbot that makes it easier to search and understand Nigerian history using natural language processing, and an Oral History Project to capture memories of older people before they are lost.

“Our belief is that people’s personal history is also national history. People exist in the context of what we consider national history. So we want to talk to as many people as possible—people with stories that feed into what becomes history,” Toromade told Communiqué.

Archiving’s oral history push joins a growing ecosystem of similar efforts. In 2024, the Nigerian Wikimedia Foundation began documenting indigenous languages through oral storytelling, while AI artist Malik Afegbua, building on the success of his Elderly Series, launched an oral history project in Ikorodu to preserve the voices of Nigerians aged 80 and above.

5. Funding the future

Archiving initially relied on crowdfunding to fund all this work, raising $38,000 across different campaigns. In 2024, it received a $160,000 grant from the Luminate Foundation. Now, the non-profit is developing a funding strategy that blends international grants, corporate CSR funding, private philanthropy, individual donations, and community or membership contributions.

There is still one source Archiving has not yet tapped: partnerships with international tech companies. With the growing adoption of AI, platforms are searching for data to enrich their large language models. In July 2023, the Associated Press signed a deal with OpenAI, granting access to its archive going as far back as 1985 to train its models and provide ChatGPT responses. OpenAI has also signed similar deals with other publishers, including Vox, Axel Springer, Dotdash Meredith, the Financial Times Group, News Corp and The Atlantic. The Information reported that these deals range between $1 million and $5 million. This could become a significant revenue source for Archiving.

But there is a caveat: Archiving is only an aggregator, not a publisher, so it cannot directly license the newspapers on its platform. If it does, it will have to figure out a revenue split with the paper publishers.

Archiving is in the fourth stage in the evolution of memory projects, where data becomes usable knowledge. Without this stage, archives risk becoming static museums: impressive, but inert. But with it, they can transform into dynamic tools for sensemaking, helping societies understand their past, confront their present, and perhaps interrupt the cycles they seem destined to repeat.

If Archiving succeeds, old newspapers will no longer be just a record of what happened; they will help determine what happens next. And they will colour the stories we tell about the future.