When Archivi.ng went live in October 2023, I was one of 13,000 people who went on the website to try it out. I searched for my family name, my hometown, the Warri crisis I had experienced as a child, and the Ibru Organization my mother had retired from. My searches either turned up nothing—the Efemuayes are a quiet family, or reminders—Ijaw and Itsekiri militants used modern military-grade hardware during the Warri crisis in the 1990s. “AK-47” did not enter my vocabulary from books or films.

Archivi.ng is important work. This is something virtually everyone can agree on. It is also ambitious work—“recapturing lost Nigerian history by digitising old newspapers and making them accessible to everyone” is a lot for a non-profit without political or government affiliations. So, when Fu’ad told me about launching a quarterly publication on top of all the archiving work, I decided to volunteer for a few months.

For the first few weeks, we called the publication The Publication, while the team conjured less literal suggestions. I would have been happy with Tales by Moonlight or Contextual Matters but thankfully I’m not in charge of such important matters. Esther, our Ops lead, came up with The Archivist, I presided over the renaming of a few documents in Notion, and thus we are.

The Archivist is a labour of love. I believe in being emotionally attached to your work because you put a little of your life into it. If you count your life in hours, minutes, and seconds, then whatever you give that time to, you give your life to. The Archivist is months of the storytelling team’s lives. Months we have spent writing, editing, designing, building, meeting, sending countless messages, and ticking off to-dos on Slack.

In every issue of The Archivist, we will bring you stories from the past—deep dives into specific events with new insights highlighting their relevance to contemporary issues. We will bring you stories from the present enriched with historical context. We will also bring you stories about us, documenting our journey and creating a public record of our work. We want to cultivate a deeper understanding and interaction with Nigerian history, increasing awareness and appreciation of the archives. Fifty thousand pages are currently accessible on our website, and we are working hard to bring four million, nine hundred and fifty thousand (4,950,000) more. In the meantime, we will make use of what we have.

We are launching this issue with four stories. “The Economics of Archiving Old Newspapers” explores the underlying economics of doing this important work. “The Archiving Roundtable” is a conversation with professionals from different fields talking about the role that archives play in making their work more impactful. My love and romance agenda is the reason for “Finding Love in a Newspaper”, a piece about how personal newspaper ads helped people find romantic connections.

The biggest story for us, and the one that consumed the most time is what we call The WAEC Story. The actual title is much longer. One hundred students were listed on the pages of The Nation newspaper as the top-performing students in the 2009 WASSCE. We were curious—what happened to them in the 15 years after they left secondary school? What did they study? How did Nigeria affect, or not affect them, in a period that spans four presidencies? And, most importantly, where are they now? We dug online for answers, sometimes finding everything we needed on LinkedIn, sometimes piecing together crumbs from university records, Facebook, and academic journals. We took all that information and created a data-led story that not only answers our questions but raises even more questions.

There are many more stories that we can and should tell. It is why we will publish three more stories during the rest of the quarter, and work towards future issues and more stories.

I write this final paragraph with pride, confidence, and gratitude. Archivi.ng is powered by a team of full-time employees and dedicated volunteers. They all pitched in to get The Archivist up and running. I am grateful to the writers and editors. I am grateful to the product designers and developers. And I am grateful to you, our readers who will read, talk about, and share our stories in your spaces.

So here it is, the first issue (of many!) of The Archivist.

Enjoy.

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