With Oludamola Adebowale, Digitising Archives is the Next Level

Yinka Olatunbosun

Fancy a regression into the past, to the Lagos of the 60s and 70s. Then, imagine being teleported to a famous Lagos nightclub of that era to watch Victor Uwaifo or Sunny Okosun in performance. For ages, archiving has been a system of documenting milestones for individuals and institutions.

Against the backdrop of archival regression, the archivist and founder of Asiri Magazine, Oludamola Adebowale embarked on the journey of digital archiving to preserve Nigeria’s history. In an exclusive interview, he revealed why he has remained committed to the project of digitising archives despite the initial setback.

“Personally, I think history itself on a very broad spectrum forms the basic foundation of our nation,” he said. “If you want to talk about the country or a particular era, the only reference point you have is history- what happened and the developmental phases of the country, the structure and other things put in place. In other for us to move forward and understand our nation, do better with policies and governance, we need to look at history and see the mistakes that we have done in the past; how can we move forward having a well-informed background. Our daily life is history, the conversation you had yesterday is history. It is very powerful when you transfer the knowledge that you have in the past to now and prepare for the future.”

From the point of view of citizen engagement, Adebowale believes that the spirit of comradeship is needed in order to access documentation. This will then be combined with government support to build a system that is sustainable for archiving business. Adebowale expressed concern over the general apathy towards documentation.

“Lack of documentation and information is a prime factor. Money is the least of the problems. Access to archives is poor. Do we have archives of our history here in Nigeria? There is lack of government system that support what we do –making it difficult to fact check a story. People start looking at you as if you are digging into the past or doing something sacrilegious. It is the attitude of many years-not understanding ‘or appreciating or knowing their history. So, when people are confronted with half-truths or half-baked truths, they react in certain ways. If you talk about the issue of Biafra people start getting agitated. ‘Why did Gowon marry during the war? He is insensitive.’ But then, it has happened and what have we learnt from it?’’

The search for archival materials sometimes gets dangerous when the concerned parties get a whiff of a researcher in need of past documents, pictures, videos or audio recording. “Some people come looking for me and sometimes, I get death threats. Whether your past is clean dark or ugly, you need to document it. But then someone gets so defensive when you ask. What are they hiding? You bury the truth so much that when the truth comes out, then you cower. We are not the alpha and omega of these narratives. We just want to have a plain ground for discussion. We bring all the back stories in history. And I try to have conversations with people based on our posts online. On Asiri platform, we have over 40,000 followers and over 3million impressions all over our social media platforms.”

Asiri is in itself a digital repository of Nigeria’s historical materials. And the social media platforms, for Asiri, are like virtual town hall meetings where conversations around the exhibits are stirred. Often too, many misinformation about history had been corrected on these platforms when facts are made available by the relatives or close associates of the persons in question.

At government-owned institutions where archives are kept and managed, most of the staff have not been trained on the new technologies that would revolutionise their work system.

“Many people just want to do a nine to five job,” he continued. “There is a strong link between poverty mentality and illiteracy. A lot of people just want to get salary. They are not passionate about it. They also do not have the right incentive or new technologies to do more. The government has failed in many aspects of our educational system.”

“The institutions need to take full responsibility of what we have now, understand this form of education and step up their game. We can do better with policies that will further enable archiving.”

Meanwhile, Adebowale emphasised the need for empowerment trainings to build capacity for efficient service delivery in archiving business. Since digital archiving is a long-term business, government grants and loans would boost the capital base for cultural entrepreneurs who are driven by passion, not profit.