There’s a particular kind of satisfaction that comes with finding something in the archive and thinking, “Oh, people are going to have a lot to say about this.”

You do the work of pulling it out, cleaning it up, putting it together and sending it into the world. And then you wait.

This month, that story was from 1963. Six Nigerian men were asked a very simple question: Why are you always broke?

We posted their answers, and the internet did what the internet does. The comment section became its own little conversation about money, responsibility and apparently, the timeless problem of your bills swallowing your salary before the month ends. Then someone noticed something I hadn’t.

One of the men in the story was Olu Falomo, an advertising executive who had died only recently. Suddenly, a story we had pulled from a 1963 publication had an unexpected connection to the present.

This is probably my favourite part of the job. Not just finding old stories, but ones that still have some life left in them. The ones that make people laugh, argue, recognise themselves, recognise someone else, or stop and say, “Wait, is that the same person?” And there are a lot of them in the archive.

If you want to help us make more Nigerian history accessible to everyone, you can fund our work by becoming a member.  

What Happened in September 2026

New projects from our second cohort

• This month, we started publishing projects from the second cohort of The Archivi.ng Fellowship. The first was It’s Not Me; It’s the Devil, a true-crime podcast series examining how guilt, faith and justice have intersected in Nigeria’s criminal justice system. 
• We launched 80-25, a database covering 45 years of insecurity in Northern Nigeria, bringing together decades of incidents to reveal recurring patterns in violence, government response and neglect. 
• We published Bullets, Bribes and Ballots, a project that has collected and archived more than 3,300 election petition judgements since 1999 to understand what happens when disputed elections reach the court.
• We also launched Aso Rock Index, a project that tracks economic growth, governance, key sectors, and living standards across five Fourth Republic administrations.
• You can explore the projects here; and keep an eye out for two more going live in the coming days.
• As part of our Election Context coverage, we launched a new series resurfacing campaign posters, newspaper adverts, magazine covers and other campaign material from elections that took place before the youngest first-time voters in next year’s election were born.
• Our weekly carousel took us back to 1979 for the story of how a Lagos gang pulled off a deadly four-minute robbery. Another story took us back to 1954, when a Nigerian boxer travelled to Britain as the only boxer in the world to hold four championship titles at the same time.
• On Previously in Nigeria, we returned to the 1960s and the story of Funmilayo Ranco, who fought her way into two sports where women were rarely seen in Nigeria. We also revisited a 1957 train disaster that ended the lives of dozens of passengers.
• Our work reached more than three million views this month and generated over 242,000 engagements from people curious about history. We also welcomed nearly 3,000 new followers into our community.

Over 4,000 new pages of Nigeria’s past now online

• We digitised more than 7,000 pages this month and made over 4,000 pages accessible on the website, including editions of The Sunday Magazine (TSM), African Concord, Weekend Concord, The Nigerian Economist and TELL.

A special gathering…

We crossed a major milestone this month with our first event in Abuja for the International Day of Democracy. 

In partnership with the High Commission of Canada in Nigeria and the Embassy of Ireland in Nigeria, we brought together diplomats, researchers, journalists and civil society organisations to examine six decades of democratic practice in Nigeria through the archive, and ask what the past can tell us about the present, ahead of the 2027 elections

What’s Next: October 2026

We are taking the Election Context Project further next month. 

We’re launching Ballot Rewind, a new series that goes back through Nigeria’s presidential elections, starting in 1979. Each edition will examine a different election year, looking at the people on the ballot, how Nigerians voted and what was happening around the country at the time. 

See you on October 27.