Here’s something I didn’t know until I saw it on Archivi.ng on June 16, 2025: Sunny Ade was nominated for a Grammy in 1983.

Synchro System, the album that earned him the nomination, eventually lost the Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording award to Clifton Chenier & His Red Hot Louisiana Band’s I’m Here. Still, the nomination marked Sunny Ade out as an artiste operating at the highest level, with work that travelled far and resonated widely.

Call me Gen Z, or a latecomer to certain corners of pop culture history, but the real takeaway is this: Nigerian artistes have always been hot cakes on the world stage. Long before the current wave of Afrobeats to the world, our art made it to the biggest stages.

The Grammy story reminds me that the present rests on a foundation carefully formed over generations, whether modern conversations recognise it or not. Archivi.ng’s work last month centred on sustaining the memory of past artistic exploits and the ways they continue to live in the present.

What Happened in June 2025

Our stories travelled: Over half a million Instagram views!

• Last month, we published the centrepiece of our current issue of The Archivist: a story tracing the work of 100 creators from history, many of them unknown to the current generation of Nigerians.
• It reached over 240,000 people on Instagram, where our community grew by more than 1,500 new followers in the past month. Weird MC left a simple comment: “Love this really do.” Others felt the same. Families of some of the creators expressed appreciation, young people found old work to hold onto, and older readers told us it brought back memories they hadn’t revisited in years.
• We collaborated with BellaNaija, Culture Custodian, NATIVE, Pulse Nigeria and Zikoko to spread the story. Their support ensured it reached far beyond our channels and reminded us what happens when memory is a communal event.
• We also shared our most widely read carousel yet: the story of a Yagba woman who married another woman in 1970 and fought the court system to stay together.
• The story reached over 280,000 people on Instagram, with more than 8,000 likes and nearly 5,000 shares. It also received over 200,000 views on Twitter.
• In the comments, people pointed out that unions like this still exist in many other cultures across Nigeria and even beyond, like the Kuryas in Tanzania, and the Kikuyus in Kenya. Every time we go into the archives, we discover something that reshapes what we thought we knew, and it never gets old.
• Another story from The Archivist that went live in June looked at the generational toll that piracy has taken on Nigerian filmmakers and why the problem persists. It’s a history marked by loss of income, credit, and creative control. But it’s also a story of persistence, of filmmakers who keep creating even when the system makes it easy to steal from them. The names change, the methods evolve, but the culture of piracy remains stubborn.
• June was a strong month on our Twitter. We recorded over 375,000 engagements, more than 80,000 above the total from the previous five months combined.
• Two posts stood out. One was TELL’s account of Abacha’s final 24 hours, which many praised for its outstanding writing. The other was a story from our archives: about the top 100 WASSCE candidates from 2009, first published last year.

Digitisation is crawling

• There’s been some drag in our digitisation efforts lately, but we expect things to pick up soon.
• We’ve continued scanning more pages of TELL magazine, even though no new entries have gone live on the website just yet. That will change. The work has been steady behind the scenes, and we’re getting closer to the next set of releases.

What’s Next: July 2025

We’ll continue spotlighting Nigeria’s creative economy and the people who keep its spark alive.

Our focus at Archivi.ng remains to document and honour the past, and to ask better questions of the future, which is why something else is keeping us busy over the next couple of months.

The Archivi.ng Event

We have an opportunity to gather, reflect, and take part in the work of memory at a physical location. It’s a chance for you to meet us, to encounter our work up close, and to help shape what the future of memory looks like.

We’ve built towards this moment since we launched in 2023, shaped by the work behind us and the questions unfolding. This is going to be a turning point for Archivi.ng, and we’re going to need you more than ever. You’ll see what I mean soon.

We'll see again on August 1.