This project emerged out of a need to critically engage Nigeria’s mining legacies through its most neglected resource—community memory. Mining Media Memory (MMM) draws attention to the silences, ruptures, and resistance within Nigeria’s mining reportage from 1935 to 2025. It bridges archival scarcity with digital tools, pushing us to ask: whose voices have shaped our understanding of extraction? And what truths lie in what was omitted?
MMM aims to restore and re-center suppressed histories by creating an accessible platform where memory, mining, and environmental justice intersect. It is designed as a research and advocacy tool for scholars, journalists, policymakers, and affected communities. Our mission is to democratize archival data, reanimate forgotten stories, and inspire ethically grounded engagement with Nigeria’s extractive past and present.
Fieldwork for this project began in Summer 2023 and is ongoing. Data was sourced through visits to the Nigerian National Archives (Enugu and Ibadan), National Library Lagos, and online investigative outlets like WikkiTimes.
Special thanks to Babalola Samuel IniOluwa (Dept. of History, University of Ibadan) and Mrs. Banke Akinlaja (formerly of Historical Flashback Magazine), who supported archive visits, digitization, and uploading of scanned reports. Samuel also led the transcription and tagging of source materials.
The MMM portal provides JPG scans, metadata, and transcriptions of each article. Users may request specific documents by submitting a short write-up for the blog. Each visualization is embedded with metadata pop-ups, offering info on date, source, and article description—linking ethnographic method to archival curation.
Uzoamaka Nwachukwu is a PhD candidate in History at Indiana University Bloomington. Her dissertation investigates extractive landscapes and memory in Eastern Nigeria using archival, ethnographic, and digital methods. She co-founded CLAIRE and the Mining Communities Archive platform.
This project was made possible by the support of the SEEKCommons Fellowship, IU’s Tobias Development Research Grant, and mentorship from Prof. Kalani Craig and the IDAH team. She thanks her committee and field partners for making this possible.
MMM uses over 250 newspaper articles spanning 90 years. These sources reveal changing narrative trends:
By organizing sources thematically and temporally, MMM recovers not only what was reported—but how mining’s memory has been shaped over time.