We’re On a mission to recapture lost nigerian history

By digitising old Nigerian newspapers and making them accessible to everyone online.
Finding information from Nigeria’s history is…complicated. Let’s play a small game. Try finding something from…1965? You’ll have little luck finding anything online written by Nigerians. Your only options are to visit a local library and look through old newspapers.

Our current office: a single room that powers our archiving operations.

“The project aims to capture not only a snapshot of Nigeria’s political, social and cultural history, but also to create an open resource for the public, researchers and journalists.” - Reuters Institute

Looking through old physical papers might cost you hours

First, you find a library that holds papers from 1965. Then you start to look through all the newspapers, from January till December. If you’re lucky, you’ll find something. If you’re not, you’d have spent anywhere from three to five hours with no results.

You deserve better. That’s why we’re doing the heavy lifting

We’re looking for every single paper ever published in Nigerian history, scanning them, and digitally archiving them for you.

Looking through our online archive will only take seconds

Think of a person, place or event, and hit search: you’ll get results instantly. We will continue digitising these papers, so you have more results until we’ve digitised every single newspaper and magazine ever published – for context, the oldest one, Iwe Irohin, was first published in 1859.

We will be archiving at least one newspaper for each day within this period – 18,627 newspapers. Our goal is to complete this phase by June 30, 2024.

Our goal is to archive;

18,627

Newspapers, at one newspaper a day for 51 years.

360K

Pages of everything from articles, to obituaries, and even vintage ads.

700K

Stories about the mundane to the magnificent aspects of daily life from past Nigeria.