Beyond Academic Archives: Community-Led Digital Preservation of Nigerian Mythology and Oral Knowledge

Watch the presentation

My presentation begins at 19:10 and runs to approximately 31:50. The video opens at that point.

The argument

Nigerian mythology lives orally, and it is not one tradition. Nigeria has 371 ethnic groups and more than 500 languages, so the Yoruba orisha traditions and the many others alongside them cannot be treated as a single body of material.

Formal preservation has not held it, and the gaps are concrete and recent. A great deal of this material moved through broadcast and much of it has not survived. Tales by Moonlight, created in 1984, is one example.

Three consequences follow from those absences. The first is research visibility, because knowledge that is never archived stays at the margins of scholarship however alive it remains in a community. The second is interpretive authority, because where there is no stable record the question of which version is authoritative does not resolve. The third is ownership, because the knowledge is given by a community and someone still decides who may speak for it.

Preservation is happening alongside the institutions

Universities, national archives and state bodies preserve a great deal, but for oral and vernacular material the work is increasingly being done elsewhere. Archivi.ng has digitised more than two hundred thousand pages of Nigerian newspapers, and Wikimedia Nigeria runs an oral-history initiative alongside it.

Oriire does the work of continuity by documenting these traditions and holding them as durable, searchable, freely accessible records. It draws more than sixty-two thousand readers a month, most arriving through organic search, from Nigeria and across the diaspora.

Interpretive authority and ownership

The same work concentrates interpretive authority. On Oriire, contributors keep their by-line, are paid for accepted work and sign a consent to publish. The Oriire Heritage Foundation is the legal owner of the collection, and I make the final editorial decisions as founder.

Ownership decides who may speak for the knowledge, who benefits from it, and whether it can be enclosed, sold or quietly lost. When a single platform holds community knowledge, it risks repeating the very extraction the colonial archive was criticised for, however good its intentions. The question of consent and collective benefit does not disappear because the platform means well.

Where this leaves us

Community-led digital preservation is no longer a possibility. It is already part of the infrastructure through which Nigerian cultural knowledge survives, operating alongside the older institutions and sometimes reaching where they do not. That shift expands access and continuity, and it relocates authority, interpretation and ownership into new hands. The challenge now is how this new infrastructure should be governed.