The Important role of Public Relations in the Library Sector

Written by Azeez Elijah olawale

There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a village square at dusk when no one is left who remembers the stories that used to be told there. It is not the silence of peace. It is the silence of forgetting.

Across Nigeria, from the emirates of the North to the kingdoms of the West, from the riverine communities of the South to the ancient towns of the East and the culturally dense corridor of the Middle Belt, this silence is spreading. Folklores that once taught children how to behave, histories that explained who a people were and why, and practices that bound communities together are slipping away, generation by generation, almost without anyone noticing until the last person who remembers them is gone.

As a national library, this loss sits close to the heart of our mandate. We exist, in part, to make sure knowledge does not disappear simply because it was never written down. It seems fitting, then, to pause and take stock of what is being lost, region by region, and why it matters.

A Nation of Vanishing Voices

In much of Northern Nigeria, oral history has traditionally been carried by court historians, praise singers, and Islamic scholars who memorized genealogies, epic tales of conquest, and moral instruction passed through generations. Hausa, Kanuri, Fulfulde, and dozens of smaller languages spoken across the region once carried entire systems of proverbs, riddles, and folktales used to teach children patience, honesty, and communal responsibility. Today, many of these smaller languages are disappearing outright. Researchers have documented that several minority tongues once spoken in states like Bauchi, Jigawa, Niger, and Taraba have already gone extinct, their communities absorbed into larger linguistic groups such as Hausa, with the unique cultural practices, oral traditions, and traditional knowledge encoded in those languages disappearing along with them. Urban migration, the dominance of Hausa as a regional lingua franca, and the pull of religious and Western education have all played a role in this quiet erosion.

Further south, the Yoruba-speaking West is home to some of Nigeria's oldest and most storied kingdoms — Ife, Oyo, Benin's cultural cousins, and dozens of others whose royal courts were once the beating heart of civic, spiritual, and cultural life. Traditionally, palaces were not just royal residences. They were courts of justice, archives of history, centers of religious authority, and stages for festivals that reenacted the founding myths of a people. That role has thinned considerably. Since Nigeria's 1999 Constitution came into force, traditional rulers have held no official executive or legislative powers within the formal framework of the state, leaving much of their authority resting on culture and trust rather than law. Many palaces today function largely as ceremonial and tourist sites rather than living institutions of governance and knowledge transmission. Commentators have long noted that Nigeria's constitution makes no reference at all to the role of traditional rulers, a gap that has pushed many royal houses toward symbolism rather than substance. Palace archives, oral chronicles (oríkì, praise poetry, and dynastic histories) increasingly exist only in the memories of aging chiefs and custodians, with few young apprentices being trained to carry them forward.

In the riverine and coastal communities of the South and Niger Delta, indigenous knowledge has historically been deeply tied to the environment — fishing calendars, boat-building techniques, water spirit traditions, and masquerade festivals that marked the seasons and honored ancestors. Much of this knowledge was never written down; it was demonstrated, chanted, and performed. As younger generations move to cities in search of education and work, and as environmental degradation from oil exploration disrupts the ecosystems these traditions were built around, fewer people remain to practice or witness these customs. Masquerade festivals in many communities have shrunk from elaborate weeks-long events to brief, poorly attended observances, if they are held at all.

Perhaps nowhere is the tension between modernity and heritage more visible than in the Igbo-speaking East. Despite being one of Nigeria's three major languages, Igbo has been classified by UNESCO as endangered, with many young Igbo speakers unable to hold conversations in their own mother tongue. This is not primarily due to population decline, but to a cultural shift: families increasingly speak English at home, schools discourage local languages, and there is a lingering association of indigenous tongues with backwardness rather than pride. The consequence is generational. Proverbs, moonlight folktales (akụkọ ifo), age-grade traditions, and title-taking systems that once conferred status and responsibility on community members are known today mostly in fragments, if at all, by people under forty.

Finally, the Middle Belt is home to one of the highest concentrations of ethnic and linguistic diversity in Africa, with hundreds of small communities each carrying distinct languages, festivals, and belief systems. This very diversity has made the region especially vulnerable. Small language groups here are often absorbed into larger neighboring languages or into Hausa and English, leaving little documentation behind. Compounding this, recurring insecurity across parts of the Middle Belt has displaced entire communities from ancestral lands, severing the connection between people, place, and the knowledge that was tied to that place — sacred groves, farming rites, and oral histories that made sense only in their original geographic and social context.

Why This Is Happening Everywhere at Once

A few common threads run through every region:

• Language shift. As English, Hausa, and Nigerian Pidgin become the practical languages of school, work, and social mobility, indigenous languages are demoted to informal or ceremonial use, and with them, the knowledge encoded in their vocabulary and idiom.
• Urbanization. Migration to cities separates young people from elders, from the land, and from the everyday contexts in which oral knowledge used to be transmitted naturally.
• Institutional gaps. Traditional rulers and cultural custodians now operate largely outside formal state structures, leaving preservation efforts dependent on individual will rather than institutional support.
• Undervaluation. Indigenous knowledge is still, in many circles, seen as something to outgrow rather than something to document and build upon.

The scale of the risk is significant. Nigeria is home to over five hundred indigenous languages, and cultural leaders have warned that dozens face the threat of extinction, with the loss threatening to diminish the nation's heritage and rob future generations of indigenous knowledge systems and traditional wisdom encoded in these languages.

What a Library Can Do

This is precisely where an institution like the National Library of Nigeria has a role to play that goes beyond books on shelves. Oral history projects, community-partnered documentation of festivals and rites, digitization of palace records where they still exist, and partnerships with linguists working to record endangered languages before their last speakers are gone, these are not peripheral activities. They are core to what it means to preserve a nation's memory.

Indigenous knowledge does not have to be a relic. It can be documented, digitized, and made accessible to the very generations at risk of losing it, so that a child in Lagos, Kano, Enugu, Calabar, or Jos can still hear the stories that shaped where they come from, even if their grandparents are the last to have grown up hearing them firsthand.

The silence spreading over Nigeria's villages does not have to be permanent. But it will take deliberate work, starting now, to make sure it doesn't become the only sound left.