I found my namesake in the archive! But unlike me, this Samson was living up to the biblical weight of his name in the 1970s.

Samson Ibeabuchi was a strongman performer who could lift a 60 kg block of wood with his dreadlocks. He toured around the world, performing for thousands of people. I was surprised that a career like that, built by a Nigerian, flourished over fifty years ago.

From that same decade, we shared a 1979 TRUST magazine feature of Lolo Willie, a Nigerian model and actress, photographed at the beach. The post reached over six thousand people on Instagram, including two grandkids of the photographer who took Lolo’s images. They had never seen his work like that before.

The archive is full of all the colourful lives of Nigerians past, both known and unknown, waiting to be discovered. We need your support to sustain what we do. 

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What Happened in April 2026

We are resurrecting ads from the past

• We launched a new social media series, to be posted on the first Monday of every month, focused on print adverts from the 1960s to the 1990s. These were the ads that shaped the everyday decisions of your grandparents, from what they drank and smoked to the cars they aspired to own. We began with beer ads this month, and will turn to margarine next month. What other products would you like us to look for in the archive?
• For The Archivist Issue 6, we published Stopped by a Nigerian Policeman, a story about the recurring pattern of police violence in Nigerian history, seen through the lives of three men in different eras.
• The story was viewed more than 100,000 times across our social platforms, prompting reflections on the emotional weight of a problem that persists across generations and the need to break it.
• On Previously in Nigeria, we returned to the golden era of boxing, spotlighting the Nigerian fighters of the 1960s and 1970s who rose to international prominence in the ring. We also looked back at the 1998 election that might have set the country on a very different path.
• Our weekly social carousels moved across time. We travelled to 1996 to explore what Nigerian men thought about their roles as heads of their households, and what happened when they were unable to provide. We revisited the story of Jesus of Oyingbo, who began his religious movement in 1952 and led it until his death in 1988. We also sampled opinions from Nigerians in 1971 on aso-ebi at social functions and its impact within homes.
• Fewer people engaged with our daily artefacts this month than we have become used to. Even so, our work reached over 2.2 million impressions, drew more than 131,000 engagements, and brought in 2,000 new followers.

The best month for scanning

• We had one of our strongest months for digitisation in April. We scanned over 11,000 new pages, covering publications including AFRICA, African Challenge, African Events, African Guardian, and TELL.
• That is more than double the number of pages we scanned in the first three months of the year combined.

What’s Next: May 2026

I mentioned in last month’s dispatch that Mariam would begin a new video series, looking at Nigeria through the eyes of a young Nigerian raised in a country very different from the one older generations remember. It did not launch as planned due to post-production delays, but it will be ready in May.

We were also unable to publish the final story of the current issue of The Archivist. But in May, we will travel together to 1977 to explore the disappearance of a distressed woman from a quiet neighbourhood in Lagos.

With that done, issue seven will begin, bringing a new set of stories under a theme I will share in the next dispatch.

See you on May 27.