(Un)Known Memories: Enugu Coal, Landscape, and the Afterlife of Extraction

This exhibit moves between what is publicly commemorated and what is submerged in the ground, the archives, and community silences.

Curated by Uzoamaka Nwachukwu Enugu / Bloomington Media Mining Memory Project

(Un)Known Memories asks how a mining town can be saturated with coal, monuments, and archival traces yet still live with a profound sense of forgetting. The exhibit moves from well-known names such as Enugu, Iva, Udi, into the unnamed hydrological and ecological systems that structured underground life and above-ground community histories, and finally to contemporary struggles over statues, massacres, and silence.

Enugu’s identity as the “Coal City” was forged in the early twentieth century, when the discovery of coal in 1909 and the establishment of the Udi, Iva Valley, and Onyeama mines transformed the escarpment into the heart of Nigeria’s colonial energy economy. Over decades, these mines powered the railways, fueled wartime industries, and anchored the rapid urbanisation of Enugu. Yet despite this long and spatially complex mining history, many national narratives compress these distinct sites—shafts, settlements, streams, and labour compounds—into a single symbolic memory of “coal.” The result is a powerful but flattened public archive in which much of the lived, environmental, and neighbourhood-level history becomes obscured. (Un)Known Memories counters this erasure by returning attention to the specific places where coal was extracted and remembered: individual mines with their own ecologies, the waterways altered by extraction, and the communities who lived beside and beneath them. By tracing these precise geographies, the exhibit reveals how Enugu’s mining past is at once widely celebrated and profoundly unknown—held in fragments, silences, and landscapes rather than in the formal memory of the nation.

The idea of (Un)Known Memories holds this tension. It takes seriously the heroic stories of miners and the widely-circulated narratives of the 1949 Iva Valley massacre, while also tracing quieter hydrological and ecological memories that rarely enter official accounts.

Curating as teaching: carrying Enugu’s mining memories through voice, gesture, and shared reflection.

Orientation

Enugu Coal Fields in Nigeria

Before turning to specific mines and memories, this section situates Enugu within Nigeria’s wider coal geography.

Hand-drawn map of Nigeria showing coal resources, railways, and waterways. — **Coal resources across Nigeria.** A schematic national map shows coal belts, railway lines, and proposed transport routes, placing Enugu in a wider extractive network.

Map zooming into Enugu State with plotted coal mine locations. — **Enugu coal field.** A zoomed-in map highlights multiple abandoned or former mine sites in Enugu State, underlining how coal extraction clustered in particular hills and valleys.

From Statue to Silences

Statue of a miner holding a lump of coal aloft at a roundabout in Enugu. — A heroic miner stands at a busy junction, coal raised high. The statue offers a tidy story: strong bodies, national development, coal as pride.

Close view of a Udi Mine plaque with text about coal tonnage and dates. — **Udi Mine plaque, 1915–1936.** The inscription lists millions of tons of coal tipped, compressing two decades of labour and risk into a single stone surface. Lives, injuries, and landscapes do not appear in the inscription.

Seen together, the roundabout statue and the Udi plaque show how Enugu’s coal past is made visible: as heroism, productivity, and sacrifice. In Pierre Nora’s terms, they operate as lieux de mémoire sites of memory, yet they also generate what Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls silences. Between the raised arm of the miner and the neat tonnage figures lie the unrecorded stories of hydrological damage, underground injuries, and families who still live above shallow galleries.

This movement “from statue to silences” signals the focus of the exhibit, illustrating how memory transitions from named mines to the less-visible ecologies that carry coal’s afterlives.

Enugu’s identity as “coal city” emerges from this concentration of mines, yet in many national narratives the specific geographies of these sites blur into a single symbol. (Un)Known Memories pulls the focus back to individual mines, streams, and neighbourhoods.

How this exhibit is organised

The page unfolds in three short, linked exhibits. You can scroll through or jump directly using the buttons below.

Exhibit I – Known Mines

Named collieries, plaques, and newspapers that fix Iva and Udi into official history.

Go to Known Mines →

Exhibit II – Unknown Ecologies

Map of Onyeama (Ekulu) mine and the hydrology running through and around the shafts.

Go to Unknown Ecologies →

Exhibit III – Erased Coal Memory

Statue politics, the AFIA NEWS film, and the systemic erasure of coal memory in Enugu.

Go to Erased Coal Memory →

Exhibit I

Known Facts: Named Mines, Plaques, and Newspapers

The first exhibit gathers materials that make Enugu’s coal history appear stable and well known: named collieries, commemorative plaques, and newspaper coverage of accidents and union demands.

Group portrait of miners at Iva Valley in 1963. — **Iva Valley Mine at 46.** A *Coal Miner* quarterly feature (June 1963) frames the mine as a proud, long-lived enterprise, emphasising years of service and round-the-clock shifts.

Newspaper clipping: Seven Die in Iva Mine Mishap, April 1956. — **“Seven Die in Iva Mine Mishap.”** *West African Pilot*, 20 April 1956. A brief column narrates the collapse of a wall during a storm, listing the dead and injured in a few lines.

Newspaper clipping calling for November 18 to be observed as a holiday in memory of miners. — **“Miners Want Nov. 18 Observed As Holiday.”** *West African Pilot*, 23 May 1960. The union asks that the date of the 1949 shootings at Iva Valley be recognised as a public holiday.

Together, these materials give us a seemingly coherent story: named mines (Iva, Udi), measurable output, identifiable dates of disaster and protest. Yet a key question for this exhibit is:

Why was the mine named “Iva,” and how does that name sit uneasily with community memory?

What kinds of histories become “official memory and why (memory selection)”:

What stories and everyday lives get left out when we only rely on named mines, plaques, and press coverage?

In official records, “Iva Valley” appears as a unit of production and a massacre site, largely detached from older Ngwo place-names and farming paths. Many residents know the name through school lessons or union commemorations, but not as a lived valley with specific streams, soils, and kin histories. Memory studies helps us see this gap between the known (public, named, archived) and the un-known (local, ecological, embodied).

Exhibit II

Unknown Facts: Hydrology and the Mining Ecology of Onyeama (Ekulu)

The second exhibit turns from names to flows. Here the focus is the map of Onyeama mine, known earlier as Ekulu mine, this map illustrates where streams cut across and under the gridded galleries.

Hand-traced underground plan of Onyeama mine with rivers and galleries marked in pen. — **Plan of Onyeama mine.** A hand-traced underground plan, kept in a former miner’s personal records, shows galleries intersected by streams sketched in blue and green.

What does it mean to follow the mine not as a name on a map, but as water flows, shafts, and underground ecological memory shaped by mining?

Why are these hydrological and ecological memories rarely part of official archives or public commemoration? What does their absence tell us about what kinds of memory get preserved and whose experience gets acknowledged?

The map reveals a dense lattice of numbered galleries, ventilation roads, and coal faces. Cutting through this grid are hand-drawn streams. They remind us that mining did not simply occupy empty space; it re-routed water, created new seepage points, and altered drainage patterns that continue to shape life in the surrounding communities.

Unlike the celebrated names of Iva or Udi, the specific hydrological systems under Onyeama/Ekulu rarely appear in official documents. Yet for ex-miners and residents, these streams are part of an everyday mental map: places to avoid during the rains, sources of polluted water, markers of where the ground has been hollowed underneath.

Exhibit III

Erased Coal Memory: Massacre, Statue, and Afterlives

The final exhibit moves to the present, focusing on how the state commemorates Iva Valley today and what remains unsaid about coal’s afterlives in Enugu.

This short film by AFIA NEWS documents the Enugu State Government’s 2023 reinstallation of the coal miners’ statue in memory of the 75th anniversary of the Iva Valley massacre. The ceremony folds together grief, pride, and political messaging, revealing both what is remembered and what remains unspoken in Enugu’s mining afterlives.

AFIA NEWS coverage of the reinstallation of the coal miners’ statue in Enugu.

▶ Watch on YouTube: ENUGU STATE GOVERNMENT REINSTALLS COAL MINERS' STATUE – AFIA NEWS

How does public commemoration through statues, plaques, anniversaries, and media — for example after the Iva Valley Massacre — shape what coal mining history is remembered? What is included, and what remains unspoken?

What does it mean- in memory-studies terms- when commemoration focuses on discrete events (massacre, labour, heroism) but neglects long-term environmental, social, and bodily consequences?

The film captures speeches, prayers, and wreath-laying at the statue site. It presents Iva Valley as a moment of collective sacrifice that can be healed through renewed recognition. Yet the hydrological and ecological legacies of mining reflected in cracked houses, unstable slopes, and polluted streams, remain largely absent from the official script.

Memory studies prompts us to read this absence not as a simple oversight but as part of what Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls abortive rituals: public ceremonies that acknowledge certain histories while leaving other, equally consequential experiences unnamed. The massacre is recalled through statues and anniversaries; coal’s longer environmental and bodily afterlives continue to live mostly in private stories and unmarked landscapes.

Memory Frameworks Connecting the Exhibit

This exhibit is in active conversation with key thinkers from the memory studies syllabus:

(Halbwachs; Jan and Aleida Assmann) – The contrast between named mines and unnamed hydrologies illustrates the difference between institutionalised collective memory and more fragile cultural memory carried in families and neighbourhoods.
(LaCapra; Hirsch) – The Iva Valley massacre, mine “mishaps,” and union appeals point to layered traumas, transmitted as postmemory to younger generations who inherit stories rather than direct experience.
(Agamben; Taylor) – Ex-miners’ testimonies, hand-drawn plans, and embodied teaching become forms of witnessing and acts of transfer, where bodies and performances store what official archives neglect.
(Nora) – Statues, plaques, and massacre anniversaries operate as lieux de mémoire, competing with everyday urban palimpsests in Enugu where traces of coal are visible but rarely signposted.
(Rothberg) – Enugu’s coal story enters the field of multidirectional memory, intersecting with global histories of slavery, colonialism, and anti-Blackness, and raising questions about who is an implicated subject in ongoing extractive regimes.
(Trouillot) – The partial recognition of Iva Valley, through selective commemorations and media silence on ecological afterlives, echoes abortive rituals, where some histories are officially acknowledged while others remain structurally unspeakable.

(Un)Known Memories thus works as both exhibit and syllabus: a coal-field where theories of memory, trauma, and justice are tested against Enugu’s material and hydrological archive.

As you move through this exhibit, consider which memories are stabilised and which remain unstable: Which parts of Enugu’s coal past are easy to narrate, and which resist language? Where does the land remember that words cannot quite hold?