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A decommissioned coalmine near the north pole is the last place you’d expect to find Indigenous stories from rural Nigeria, but deep below the Arctic permafrost of Svalbard a storage unit contains a cache of cultural and literary records from the West African country.
The Arctic World Archive (AWA) is a data storage unit where organisations and individuals can deposit records kept on specialist digitised film called Piql that lasts up to 2,000 years. On 27 February, Nigeria became the first African country to place archives at the facility 300 metres beneath a mountain where the cold, dark, dry conditions are perfect for preservation.
Inspired by the nearby Svalbard global seed vault, a collection of more than a million seed samples stored as an insurance policy against catastrophe, AWA was established to hold the “world’s memory” for future generations. Started in 2017 by the Norwegian technology company that developed Piql, it contains an eclectic range of historical and creative records originating in 37 countries, from sources including the Vatican Library and the European Space Agency, and works as diverse as Chopin’s manuscripts and the work of Belgian photographer Christian Clauwers, who has documented the Pacific’s disappearing Marshall islands.
The Nigerian records are a mix of social and cultural history, and archives from its creative industries, drawn from 12 Nigerian organisations, including private art foundations, museums and libraries.
The collection was initiated by historian Nze Ed Emeka Keazor when he was appointed chair of Piql’s first Africa office in Lagos in 2022, and started to approach cultural organisations in Nigeria to encourage them to preserve their records.
“It took me a year and a half of going to Abeokuta in Ogun state to speak to the head of archives at the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library,” says Keazor who travelled to Svalbard last month with colleague Esona Onuoha to hand over the archives.
Other institutions involved include Lagos art gallery Bloom Art; the Asaba Monument Trust which memorialises the 1967 Asaba massacre; Nsibidi Institute, a social research organisation run by Keazor; and the Umuchieze Community Legacy Deposit, a cultural project aimed at preserving Indigenous knowledge and history.
“It is important to me that Nigeria is remembered, because my work is about building cultural infrastructure,” says Ugoma Ebilah, founder of Bloom Art. “Nigeria has produced some of the world’s brightest and most creative people. It’s not a coincidence that in the same year this archive deposit is made, the Grammys finally decided to acknowledge the contributions of Fela Anikulapo Kuti [awarding him a Lifetime Achievement Award].”
During another significant moment for Nigeria’s creative community, British-Nigerian director Akinola Davies Jr won the outstanding debut Bafta for his film, My Father’s Shadow, a coming of age film that follows two brothers and their father during Nigeria’s historic 1993 election.
In his speech, Davies encouraged everyone to “archive your loved ones. Archive your stories, yesterday, today and for ever.”
In Nigeria, where libraries and museums are often underfunded and remain largely paper-based, it is easy for research or documents from the past to get lost or remain buried.
Aware of the fragility of public records, Dr Chima Korieh, an expert in West African social and economic history at Marquette University in Wisconsin, US, led a project to help Umuchieze community in Imo State, south-east Nigeria, preserve their stories, accounts of their cultural practices and rites to adulthood, and records from precolonial Nigeria. Its AWA deposits included manuscripts of the history of the Umuchieze people, and reports highlighting the community’s judicial and political systems.
“I can tell you, from 1960 onwards most of the public records that should be in the archives in Nigeria are not there,” says Korieh. “Some of the materials you have in the Nigerian archives today are in danger of being lost because they are not well preserved.”
For Korieh the project is not just about storing information in a far-flung facility. “The whole community is involved in this process, and we aim to open up a community centre in Umuchieze where the public would have access to the materials.”
The National Commission for Monuments and Museums and the National Council for Arts and Culture also made deposits, including reports on Nigeria’s creative economy, such as the music and film industries.
“One of the key things that has affected Africa is memory. It is oftentimes not properly recognised or stated because we have not been deliberate about protecting and projecting our narrative,” says Obi Asika, director-general of the National Council for Arts and Culture. “So when the opportunity came to partake and be part of the first in Africa to publish there, it was good to be part of history. We’re proud to be part of that.”
It is not just written history at risk of disappearing. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center study, 38% of webpages between 2013 and 2023 no longer exist, which means that a lot of information and history have simply disappeared. AWA grew out of a research project aimed at finding a secure way to store data longterm. “The world is getting more and more aware of how fragile data storage is – each time you need to migrate it, it can change,” says AWA co-founder Katrine Loen.
But at €9,000 (£7,773) a reel, Piql film is an expensive investment for cash-strapped institutions. In response, AWA switched from being a commercial enterprise to a non-profit in 2025 so that funds can be used to subsidise organisations that need financial support to take part. This year it partnered with Unesco to archive the organisation’s memory of the world register, an archive of significant heritage documents, as well as records of world heritage sites, which will be stored as digital 3D scans.
Alongside the archives stored at AWA are instructions on how to decode them. It also intends to give depositers tokens that will tell future generations where to find the storage facility.
Svalbard’s unique geology, with rock formations from almost every geological era, has earned it a reputation for containing the history of the world. “Now,” says Loen “We are putting in the knowledge of humanity.”
For Nigeria, says Asika, it is the beginning of “a long journey towards narrative restitution and making sure that in all the spaces where we should be, we are presenting.”
