If you've spent any time on the internet in Nigeria, chances are you've come across a WhatsApp broadcast, Twitter thread, or Facebook post about the rise of fraud in the country. It's often framed as a modern problem driven by technology, shifting moral values, and economic hardship. But history offers a deeper perspective.

An article by P. Onye, published in the West African Pilot in July 1954, serves as a reminder that fraud has long been embedded in Nigeria's story. In the article, which we shared on Twitter in early February, the author warned of growing corruption in business and government, lamenting how many Nigerians were seeking shortcuts to wealth. 

As we archive and revisit these records, we're reminded that history doesn't just tell us where we've been, it challenges us to decide where we're going.

This fuels Archivi.ng's work to preserve records, ensure access, and spark critical conversations on Nigeria's past and future. Here's how we advanced the work last month, but first, a few changes are coming to how we send this. We're also evolving this to include internal info on what's changing inside Archivi.ng, so you can see exactly how we're building a future of a richer Nigerian context.

Release Notes: February 2025

Let's start with Digitisation: 150,000+ pages digitised

• It's been a slow start for digitisation this year, and for good reason: our super-lean Archiving Operations team has mostly spent the time fixing all the systems around the core archiving process. 
• We don't expect a lot of progress on the digitisation front till April, but we're hiring an Archiving Operations Intern on the team. If you're obsessively meticulous and don't mind spending endless hours every day listening to the quiet hum of a gigantic scanner, apply here. 
• While our in-house scanner won't be making much progress, we're testing a two-pronged, decentralised scanning approach. The first one is with our friends at Free Knowledge Africa (FKA), a team obsessed with preserving materials already in the public domain. We're also working with students at the University of Ibadan to do with their phones what we're trying to do with large-format, expensive scanners. It's produced some interesting results, but it's not there yet.
• February saw the completion of our digitisation of DRUM magazines from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. Thanks to our partnership with FKA, we've also digitised pages from The Daily Service, West African Pilot, Daily Comet, Daily Telegraph, Daily Times, Daily Express, and Southern Nigerian Defender from 1948 to 1972, now being prepared for public access.
• We also got something in the mail from someone in the community in Kaduna: a bound sack stuffed with volumes of really old magazines. If you'd like to send us pre-2010 stuff from an old personal library or archive, contact us @startarchiving on any of our social media accounts.

The Archives are now a little more Accessible

• You can now view newspapers by Edition, allowing you to explore newspaper pages by title. Currently, you can try it out with P.M. News and Nigeria Magazine. Take it for a spin, and leave some feedback.
• Still, we're behind with public access, with around 100k pages inaccessible to the general public. If you're working on a project that requires historical context beyond what's currently available by way of Archivi.ng Search, holler. We might still be able to help. 

On Sensemaking: We Have Momentum On Social

• It's been clear to us for a while that it's not enough to digitise papers and make them accessible; we need to facilitate sensemaking and unlock the insights trapped in the documents. Social continues to be a great vehicle for this. 
• More people have seen our artefacts on Twitter in the past two months than in all of 2024. Combined. Our little TikTok experiment also garnered 300k views. If you're on TikTok, you should follow us there.
• But we're also exploring other ways to do it in ways that drive deeper engagement. It's why we closed a partnership with Learn Politics, and together, we're experimenting with ways to give students more meaningful access to historical context.

What's Next: March 2025

By the end of the year, we want to digitise over seven decades of Nigerian history and put a lot of energy into making them accessible—that's the point. March is about troubleshooting the problems getting in the way of some of that. For example, technical delays mean that we don't always have the dedicated, full-time talent to drive our most technically challenging outcomes—we're still heavily dependent on volunteer efforts from our engineering team.

This March, we begin the process of building out a full-time engineering team. But there's other stuff we’re excited about: 

Women's History Month 

March is Women's History Month, and we're an organisation dedicated to history. So it's only fair that we're dedicating every single day of this month to uncovering and celebrating the women who have shaped Nigeria's past.

Too often, the influence of Nigerian women has been buried, their names forgotten, and their contributions overshadowed. But history tells a different story, one where women weren't just bystanders but participants in politics, business, and culture.

Across all our platforms, we'll post daily stories highlighting women and their vital stories. From fearless activists to pioneering scholars, businesswomen and incredible unsung artists, we're bringing their legacies to the forefront where they belong.

To get us going, Esther Eze, our Operations Lead, wrote a note introducing this Issue of The Archivist. You should read it.

Women have always been at the heart of Nigeria's history. This March, we're making sure you remember their names.

See you on April 1.