In September 1992, Ezra Rimdan arrived at what was supposed to be a routine traffic stop at a police checkpoint in Yaba, Lagos, but police officers shot him. There are conflicting reports about what led to what, but Rimdan died.
It wasn't until after the murder that the officers realised their victim was a colonel of the Nigerian Army, sparking a bloody interagency war that created a vacuum which allowed armed robbers to take over the streets of Lagos.
To address the crime wave at the time, the Nigeria Police Force created the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), and the rest was history.
Not only does Rimdan's story shed light on the long history of police violence in Nigeria, but it also adds some colour to the origin story of SARS and provides context to its own reign of terror that led to its eventual dissolution in 2020.
Here's an interesting problem: if you had chosen to do a trail of that history last week, you would have likely dug through piles of dusty, possibly decaying newspapers in a national library, wondering where exactly to look. But now, Archivi.ng is piloting a digitisation project that will make old, forgotten newspaper stories that are now history easily accessible online.
This is the story of how it came together.
How Archivi.ng was born
In August 2019, Fu'ad Lawal, the editor-in-chief of Zikoko at the time, tweeted about the digitisation of the academic research projects authored every year by thousands of final-year students in Nigeria.
The thinking behind it was simple: whoever was interested could archive final-year research papers from all over Nigeria to make them accessible online instead of rotting away in some dark storage room or even on dumpsites as they currently do.
Lawal's tweet met a mostly warm reception, but a private message from an acquaintance soon redirected his energy. When Cynthia Ndeche messaged him with infectious enthusiasm to volunteer her services for the project, Lawal mentioned his idea could apply to newspapers too.
In response, she was immediately excited about how useful it would be in providing important context for Nigeria's historical events. The newspapers stuck, and quickly became the primary focus.
Ndeche's early cheerleading in that first private conversation between the duo is one of the main reasons Archivi.ng now exists.
The most pressing question after that exchange was how to even get access to old newspapers in the first place. At the time, Lawal couldn't act much on his idea because he was just a couple of weeks away from embarking on Jollof Road, an 80-day road trip that took him and his team to all mainland countries in the West African region. It was an expansion of his Pulse 36 project, a road trip across Nigeria's 36 states in 2017 when he worked at Pulse Nigeria.
Things soon changed at the tail end of the Jollof Road trip when he made a re-entry into Nigeria in December 2019 and visited the Usman Dan Fodio Library in Sokoto. It was there he realised national libraries store physical archives of newspapers that stretch back decades — this was going to solve his collation problem.
While on a five-day break between returning from Jollof Road and resuming at the Zikoko office, he finally wrote a concept note for Archivi.ng to draw out its most fundamental parts. In 42 minutes, he outlined a goal to archive at least one newspaper a day from January 1, 1960, to December 31, 2010 — a total of 18,627 days, the equivalent of 51 years of stitching together a collective Nigerian memory.
Ndeche was the first to read the concept note, but at this time, Lawal had also started rallying material support from friends and acquaintances who had heard about the project.
How Archivi.ng blew up
Just before the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, Archivi.ng's volunteer researchers located 97% of the newspapers needed to complete 51 years of digitisation. But Lawal had yet to figure out how to properly finance the project, and there seemed to be a lot of waiting around since his August 2019 tweet.
With not much else happening, he wrote an unpublished Archivi.ng manifesto, titled 18,000 Days, on his Vistanium publication. It centred on the fact that if you searched for old Nigerian stories from the 1970s, for example, you'd most likely find them in the New York Times, an American publication, but not local publishers because Nigerian newspapers from that era lacked digital archives.
Lawal was nervous about what to do with the draft and shared the link with his guy, Justin Irabor, who loved it so much and excitedly shared it with his thousands of Twitter followers, unaware it was for his eyes only. More people read the project manifesto, forcing Lawal’s hand to properly publish it.
This was July 2020, and the accident became Archivi.ng's real tipping point, attracting more volunteers and donors who were willing to throw money at it.
This kind of attention kicked things off again and pushed Lawal to contact the Lagos State Records and Archives Bureau in October 2020 to initiate conversations about getting access to its archives. This would make sourcing newspapers easier, but the agency's director-general at the time, Bilikiss Adebiyi-Abiola, also the founder of WeCyclers, disclosed it was impossible to deal with a non-entity. It was the first time it occurred to Lawal to register Archivi.ng as a company, setting off another journey into crippling limbo.
How Archivi.ng got its groove back
To become a proper operation, the project needed three things. The first was to register as a non-profit, but this lasted over half a year due to a bureaucratic crawl at the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC). This registration also wouldn't be complete without an important approval from the office of the Attorney-General of the Federation, a process further complicated by a strike action by judicial workers that started in April 2021 and lasted 64 days.
Because Nigeria's intellectual property law considers newspapers as literary works, Archivi.ng needed to get clear permission from publications to reproduce and redistribute their old newspapers. Lawal's initial conversations with Punch and Vanguard, two of Nigeria's most prominent newspaper publications, hit frustrating brick walls with no resolution in sight.
A crucial third factor constituting a nuisance was the COVID-related disruption in the global supply chain, slowing down the acquisition of the large-format scanner needed to scan the newspapers — the price tag was ₦19 million.
When these brick walls hit a head in May 2021, Lawal published another post titled Limbo, this time on the Archivi.ng Substack, to rant about everything. It was a public cry for help that worked wonders.
The post directly solved two of his three major problems. Lade Tawak, a volunteer, asked her dad to speak to his friend, Bayo Onanuga, the founder of PM News, a newspaper that started nationwide distribution in 1994. A few phone conversations later, the publication reached a legal agreement with Archivi.ng to reproduce and redistribute its old newspapers.
Limbo also caught the attention of Ayodeji Rotunwa, a journalist, who asked Lawal what he needed the most. He then introduced him to Stanley Achonu, the Nigeria director of OneOrg, to help sort out the registration stall. Achonu moved from office to office at the Ministry of Justice, knocking on every door to move the paperwork along to finally turn Archivi.ng into a legal entity — registered as Dust To Digital, a reference to the dust that warehoused newspapers gather.
With legal status in the bag, fundraising became easier and Archivi.ng could ask for bigger checks. Opemipo Aikomo, the head of design at Paystack, made the first donation of ₦50,000 to Archivi.ng in 2020. Since then, individual donations have ranged from as low as ₦1,000 to as high as $25,000. Every bit helped.
Lawal could finally pay a deposit for the advanced book scanner that could capture high-resolution images with the efficiency that Archivi.ng's workload demanded. The acquisition of this scanner was crucial because a regular scanner would be unable to scan the typical A2 and A3 paper formats of newspapers. The scanner arrived in Nigeria in November 2022 but spent another month behind red tape at Customs until its eventual release in January 2023. It was time to get to work.
Archivi.ng is a labour of love
Despite the huge monetary cost needed to give Archivi.ng legs, Lawal would argue that the most important component is a tribe of people ready to buy into its vision at the drop of a hat.
Since that 2019 tweet, Archivi.ng has become the doted lovechild of scores of volunteers who have contributed to building its foundations in their own ways.
The project's core team currently includes Ted Oladele, Flutterwave's vice president of emerging technologies and innovation; Hannah Kates, the head of product at Stears; Eruke Onohwosa, a global enterprise account manager; Ayoola Salako, a marketing operations manager at LemFi; Kayode Idowu, a media production manager at Flutterwave; Diseye Amy Naasin, human resources lead at Eden Life, and a tribe of other enterprising professionals.
The web of intricate coding breathing life into the Archivi.ng website is thanks to the critical work of Farouq Oyebiyi, a staff software engineer at Mediafly; Aisha Oyegunle, a senior frontend engineer at Flutterwave; and Joshua Paul, a backend engineer at Eden Life.
Since scanning operations commenced in April 2023, the archiving associates duo of Boyega Adediran and Grace Busayo have archived an estimated 50,000 pages while working 9 am to 5 pm shifts from Mondays to Fridays. The operation has been happening inside Lawal's home office because the team cannot afford to rent a space, yet.
The archiving associates are assisted by an operations associate, Ifeyinwa Ogbue, forming a trio of the only Archivi.ng team members working full-time.
All the approximately 50,000 pages scanned since April only account for PM News reports, which means to reach its goal of archiving 51 years' worth of newspaper reports by June 2024, the Archivi.ng team must convince older newspapers like Vanguard (first published in 1983), Punch (1971) and Tribune (1949) to come on board. Other newspapers, whether actively in circulation or now defunct, are also in its sights.
Who's Archivi.ng useful for?
Online archives like the one Archivi.ng is establishing provide context and strengthen general civil discourse. This is generally useful for knowledge workers like journalists, economists, academics, filmmakers and content creators.
The digitisation of old newspapers also opens a window into how policies from decades ago have influenced the present. This can be useful for people interested in learning from history and acting accordingly.
Archivi.ng can also create a collective memory for Nigerians, notably notorious for being terrible students of history due to a general lack of access to materials. Maybe this change can even foster a stronger sense of collective identity.
In the context of present-day use cases, Archivi.ng can be critical for large language models. Intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard would suddenly have a deeper well of knowledge about Nigeria to draw from when answering relevant queries, especially since newspapers provide a diverse range of data sources, information and insight.
What's the future of Archivi.ng?
On September 30, 2023, Archivi.ng launched Nigeria's first truly comprehensive digital newspaper archive with a version that allows users to search for and find stories published by PM News between 1994 and 2010.
The project has raised $40,000 in donations, but Lawal reckons the team needs an additional injection of at least $100,000 to finish phase one and kickstart phase two in June 2024.
The whole point of phase one is to show what's possible. The plan for phase two is to archive at least one newspaper each from Nigeria's six geopolitical zones and stretch the timeline as far back as 1900.
While the general archives would remain free to the public, Archivi.ng plans to start experimenting with monetisation by mid-2024, building extra features that would be locked behind a paywall.
The goal of the undefined phase three is for Archivi.ng to start drifting beyond the borders of Nigeria and into other African countries where digitisation is also a burning problem.
DSP Abass Makanjuola was the senior police officer who ended Rimdan's life at that checkpoint in September 1992, a single event that caused a ripple effect which broke the Nigerian spirit in 2020. It's easy to lose track of what happened to his court trial because newspaper reports from that time are non-existent online today.
Archivi.ng solves that problem.