Africa

How to digitize Nigeria’s history — one newspaper at a time

THE SCENE

LAGOS — The office where Fu’ad Lawal and his team of four work out of is an intentionally dimly-lit upstairs bedroom in his home, somewhere in the Lekki neighborhood of Lagos. On their best day, they scanned 900 pages of newspapers published sometime in the last thirty years. They have uploaded 50,000 pages to their website Archivi.ng, but it is only a small step of a grand ambition.

Lawal’s goal with Archivi.ng is to digitize every Nigerian newspaper published every day since independence in 1960. It is a history project to provide context for conversations about politics and the economy but also a record of language, culture and mundane aspects of Nigerian life, he says. It formally started in April when the team procured a seven-feet tall overhead scanner after raising $15,000 from donors since 2020.

Only one now-defunct newspaper’s complete daily editions between 1994 and 2010 have been scanned in the months since. But some of the pages freely accessible on the website — including those featuring decades-old allegations that current president Bola Tinubu may have used forged academic documents for elections in the 1990s — have gone viral online since Archivi.ng went live this October.

KNOW MORE

When complete, Archivi.ng would contain at least 5 million pages of old newspapers. It would take five years to reach that goal with one scanner and four people, Lawal estimates.

Due to its current structure as a non-profit, the team continues to raise money only through donors. Many of those have been individuals who became aware of the project on social media. Access to the site is currently free but there’s a future in which Archivi.ng begins to charge for advanced types of use, Lawal says.

ALEXANDER’S VIEW

At the moment, the best places to read old Nigerian newspapers are in the libraries of some of the country’s oldest public universities in Ibadan, Zaria, and Nsukka. But even those do not offer comprehensive repositories; poor care has led to some records being lost, and publishers serving particular regions have limited reach in others. In any case, not everyone can get to a physical library.

Archivi.ng is changing that dynamic dramatically. With features like search by date and AI-generated page summaries, it offers anyone with a smartphone access to what, for many, seems a trove of previously unknown history. Nigeria’s public education policy in recent decades has de-emphasized teaching history in primary and secondary classrooms for fears over ethnic tensions about what and how to teach, particularly on hot button subjects like the Biafra civil war.

Those ethnicity and religion-charged questions of prejudice and bias that have hampered the formal teaching of Nigerian history also come into play when relying on the reportage of journalists. Newspapers from pre-independence Nigeria were typically founded by the most influential political figures in each region, whether Nnamdi Azikiwe’s West African Pilot in the southeast or Obafemi Awolowo’s Nigerian Tribune in the southwest.

It is why Archivi.ng’s northstar is to have as many different newspapers as possible for various viewpoints, without applying filters for publishers’ possible misinformation or propagandist leanings. “Editorial judgment is expensive,” Lawal told Semafor Africa. “Deciding what to scan is an extra layer of decision making that will cost us thousands of hours.”

Hard as it may seem, Lawal’s motivation is anchored on emerging information trends that demonstrate the need for recorded African history on the internet if the continent is to be part of the global economy. “How represented is African data in large language models? If you ask ChatGPT a question about pre-internet Nigerian history, it’s hard to find anything correct because there’s not a lot to work with,” he said.

Read on for more details and a view from a Nigerian archivist.

Tackling food insecurity with science

The world’s greatest sorghum scientist might not sound like the sexiest of accolades, but when your research has been responsible for helping to save millions of lives it’s one of which you can be proud.

Sorghum is one of the world’s most widely consumed cereals and has been a staple of African diets for centuries. It is known for its hardiness, adaptability, and variety of uses across the world. It also happens to be the crop that Ethiopian-born plant geneticist Gebisa Ejeta has dedicated his career to and for which he has won numerous awards and recognition as one the world’s top scientists focused on food security.

Ejeta was in the headlines this week after receiving the National Medal of Science from U.S. President Joe Biden. Over the course of more than three decades, Ejeta has been responsible for multiple groundbreaking discoveries in the study of sorghum. He has effectively helped feed millions by developing strains of sorghum that are resistant to both drought and the parasitic weed Striga, which is responsible for more than 50% cereal yield losses in sub-Saharan Africa.

He first developed a high-yielding, drought-resistant sorghum variety during his time as a researcher in Sudan in the early 80’s. Hageen Dura-1 hybrid, a sorghum variety developed by Ejeta, was first released commercially in 1983 following trials in which it out-yielded traditional sorghum varieties by 50% to 100%. An estimated 1 million acres of Hageen Dura-1 is grown in Sudan every year, and Ejeta’s work contributed to the development of Sudan’s commercial sorghum seed industry.

Ejeta, alongside Larry Butler, his late Purdue University colleague, then turned his attention to the parasitic weed Striga and developed the first Striga-resistant, drought-resistant sorghum variety. The Striga-resistant variety out-yielded local varieties by as much as four times, even in areas of severe drought.

— Martin K. N Siele

Sotheby’s, the UK-based art auctioneer, is organizing a free and confidential valuation of modern African art in Lagos, Johannesburg, and Cape Town next month. It will include paintings, sculptures, photography, and printmaking spanning over 100 years of African art history to modern times, according to Hannah O’Leary, Sotheby’s head of modern and contemporary African art.

She said the valuation, scheduled for Nov. 2-14, will target African artists from across the continent and in the diaspora. “African artists are finally gaining the recognition they deserve globally,” O’Leary told Semafor Africa. She highlighted a painting by Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu that set a record for an artist of African origin when Sotheby’s sold it for $9.3 million earlier this month.

London-based Sotheby’s, which conducts two auctions each year dedicated to modern African art, has featured work by renowned artists such as Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui, the late Nigerian artist Ben Enwonwu, and the late South African artist/musician Gerard Sekoto.

Atim Annette Oton, the curator at New York-based Calabar Gallery, told Semafor Africa that focusing on Nigeria and South Africa was strategic as the two leading African economies have “potential sellers who bought early works of established artists and emerging artists that you would want to auction.”

— Muchira Gachenge

The 13th edition of the longest running fashion show in Lagos held this week, showcasing work from designers across Nigeria pushing to break new ground, even as the cloud of grueling economic conditions casts uncertainty on the ease of doing business.

The week got into its groove on Thursday with a runway show in which 12 designers exhibited their latest cuts. “I am so impressed with what Nigerian designers continue to do and I feel we are pushing boundaries and getting better every year,” said Nicole Chikwe, a former model, media personality and Fashion Week regular.

Lagos Fashion Week is one fixture of the city’s ‘culture season’ which typically begins at the end of September. It is usually a well-attended procession of art, food and fashion events that stretch well into the end of November. But the backdrop for this year’s season is a rapidly depreciating local currency whose value against the dollar on the more widely used parallel market has crashed by 15% since the beginning of October. It is one more layer of complication for a local fashion industry that sources significant volumes of fabric in dollars, while competing with foreign brand-name designers and floods of second-hand imports from Nigeria’s West African neighbors.

— Alexander

🌍 How did modern West African popular music forms like highlife and juju music come about? For PAM, Ayomide Olaniyan dives into the history of palm wine music, a sound with roots in the early 20th century. Kru seamen, originally from Liberia, Gambia and Sierra Leone, familiarized themselves with the guitars that the European sailors had on their ships and started to play it in a more percussive fashion. Over the years pioneering artists like Ghana’s E.T. Mensah (pictured) and then Nigeria’s Victor Olaiya and Bobby Benson created entirely new genres with the guitars, horns and much more establishing post-independent Anglo West Africa as home of popular entertainment.

🌍 European governments are exploring green energy deals with African countries but those countries should be bargaining for a better deal, posits a piece in African Arguments. Countries, including Nigeria, Algeria, Namibia, and South Africa, are being presented “green hydrogen” deals labeled as “mutually beneficial.” The idea is to use Africa’s wind and solar resources to produce green hydrogen as an alternative energy source. But Tina Lee writes that European governments should pledge to build out the energy infrastructure in their partner African countries to benefit locals through access to clean and stable energy.

🇧🇮 Former interim president of Burundi Sylvestre Ntibantunganya says they have learned that there is no path to power but to seek the consent of the people through inclusive, free and fair elections and acknowledging the importance of multipartism. He told Deutsche Welle that thirty years after Burundi descended into bloody civil war between Tutsi-dominated soldiers and Hutu rebel groups following the assassination of the first elected president Melchior Ndadaye, the country of 11 million people is now on a path to healing and reconciliation.

🇧🇫 Russia was responsible for the disinformation campaign aimed at destabilizing Burkina Faso which led up to the 2022 coup when former president Roch Marc Kaboré was deposed, Elizabeth Dwoskin writes for the Washington Post. Citing evidence gathered over two years of interviews and reviewing social media posts, as well as the work of Percepto International — a company operated by Israelis that pioneered disinformation-for-hire industry — Dwoskin found out that Russia spent years laying the groundwork online for political upheaval in the region, after which overtly pro-Russian coup leaders took over.

🗓️ King Charles III and Queen Camilla start their state visit to Kenya. They will celebrate the relationship of the two countries but also acknowledge the painful aspects of colonial history. (Oct. 31- Nov. 3)

🗓️ The South African finance minister will table the medium term budget in parliament on Wednesday. The budget sets policy goals and priorities, forecasts macroeconomy trajectory, and projects the fiscal framework over the next three years. (Nov. 1)

🗓️ The 10th Africa Fintech Summit will bring together entrepreneurs, investors, and regulators in Lusaka, Zambia. (Nov. 2-3)

🗓️ The 20th African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) Summit Forum kicks off in Johannesburg. Key delegations from all member countries, regional economic entities, and representatives from the private and public sectors will meet to strengthen trade and economic ties between the U.S. and sub-Saharan Africa. (Nov. 2-4)

• Content moderation on the internet has gotten harder — and easier — because of advances in artificial intelligence.
• China’s push to control a strategic reef in the South China Sea is sparking fears in the Pentagon that Beijing is seeking to exploit the U.S.’s focus on the Middle East and Ukraine.
• The AI boom’s chip shortage has an unlikely hero: the blockchain.

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— Yinka, Alexis Akwagyiram, Alexander Onukwue, Martin Siele, and Muchira Gachenge