Written By Azeez Elijah Olawale
Every nation carries its true wealth inside the stories, songs, and
customs that pass down quietly from one generation to the other, and Nigeria
stands as one of the richest examples of this anywhere on the African
continent. Our people speak more than five hundred languages, and inside each
of these languages lives a store of proverbs, oral history, festivals, and
ancestral wisdom that no single book could ever fully hold. Sadly, a large
share of these treasures exist only inside the memory of elders, traditional
rulers, and community custodians, and this means that every passing year
carries a real risk of losing pieces of who we truly are as a people. This is
exactly why the growing partnership between the National Library of Nigeria and
our traditional institutions matters so much to our shared future as a united
and proud people.
The National Library of Nigeria was established through the National
Library Act, and it carries the formal mandate to collect, preserve, and make
available every piece of published material that comes out of this country.
Over the years, the institution has grown into what many now call the
intellectual memory of the nation, a place built to hold onto the record of who
we are and what we have achieved as a people. Its branches now spread across
the states of the federation, placing trained staff and preservation tools much
closer to the very communities whose knowledge and history need saving. That
closeness to the people is exactly what makes a working partnership with
traditional institutions possible in the first place, because heritage cannot
be preserved from a distance alone.
Traditional rulers, family heads, and community elders hold a kind of
knowledge that rarely appears in any government file or printed record, and
their cooperation gives the National Library something no amount of funding
could buy on its own. These custodians carry the names of ancestors, the
meanings behind festivals, the histories of migration and settlement, and the
wisdom behind local customs that have guided their communities for centuries.
Without their willingness to share these details openly, no digitisation
programme, however well designed, could ever capture the full and honest
picture of Nigerian life. The National Library has come to recognise this
truth, and its current leadership has built real outreach toward these
custodians into its official plans and programmes.
Professor Chinwe Veronica Anunobi took office as the National Librarian
and Chief Executive Officer in September 2021, becoming the seventh person to
lead this apex institution since it began operations decades earlier. From her
very first weeks in the role, she set out an eight-point agenda meant to guide
her administration, and this agenda placed heavy emphasis on digitisation,
indigenous language documentation, and stronger partnerships with stakeholders
across the country. Her leadership has since pushed the National Library toward
a broader digital transformation, one that touches everything from how books
are catalogued to how oral heritage gets captured and stored for the future.
This shift did not happen by accident, and it reflects a deliberate choice to
treat technology as a tool for protecting culture rather than replacing it.
One clear outcome of this digital transformation is the National
Repository of Nigeria, a platform built to hold the country's scholarly,
literary, and cultural output in one accessible digital space. Inside this
repository sits a dedicated collection built specifically around indigenous
languages, containing dictionaries, learning materials, folk stories, and
cultural documents drawn from communities across Nigeria's many ethnic groups.
Any Nigerian researcher, student, or curious young person can now search
through this collection from a phone or computer, something that would have
required travelling to a physical archive only a decade ago. Building a
resource like this takes years of steady work, and it depends entirely on
cooperation between library staff and the communities whose knowledge fills its
pages.
A clear and specific example of this fieldwork already sits inside the
repository, under a Family History collection that the National Library
published in 2023 and edited personally by Prof. Anunobi alongside a senior colleague and deputy director, Mrs. Mistura Abdulazeez. This series, titled Nigeria's Rich and Diverse Cultural
Heritage, Our Pride, sent library staff into specific towns and communities to
gather stories that had never been properly written down before, then turned
those stories into standalone documented booklets. One volume covers Durbi
Takusheyi in Katsina State, recording the royal burial site, the succession
customs of the pre-Islamic era, and nearby landmarks such as the Gobarau
Minaret and the Kusugu well. Other volumes in the same series cover Umuaja in
Delta State, Ilare in Osun State, and Ngwo in Enugu State, each one documenting
local origin stories, taboos, festivals, and natural landmarks that carry deep
meaning for the people who live there. The repository also holds an older work
called The Kings and Chiefs of Old Calabar, covering the traditional rulers of
Calabar between 1785 and 1925 among other works, showing that this kind of documentation of royal
institutions has mattered to the library for decades and continues to grow
today.
Alongside the repository, the National Library also runs the Virtual
Library of Nigeria, a digital platform designed to widen access to academic and
cultural resources for every citizen regardless of where they happen to live.
Together with tools such as the Online Public Access Catalogue and the Index to
Nigerian Newspapers, these platforms form a connected digital system meant to
strengthen how the nation organises, finds, and shares its own knowledge. Prof.
Anunobi has described these platforms as central to improving what she calls
the discoverability of Nigerian knowledge resources, meaning that information
which once sat quietly in a single physical location can now reach anyone with
an internet connection. This kind of infrastructure gives indigenous knowledge,
once it has been documented, a real chance of reaching future generations
rather than fading away unseen.
Language sits at the very heart of indigenous knowledge, because so much
of our proverbs, oral history, and traditional wisdom exists only in the exact
words our ancestors chose to pass them down. UNESCO estimates that roughly two
languages disappear somewhere in the world every single month, a sobering
statistic that pushed the National Library to treat indigenous language
documentation as a genuine emergency rather than a routine project. With
support secured from UNESCO, the National Library trained around sixty
participants made up of students, teachers, young adults, and authors,
equipping them with the skills needed to properly document their own family
heritage in their native indigenous languages. This training programme shows
exactly what a working collaboration looks like in practice, since it placed
real documentation tools directly into the hands of ordinary Nigerians rather
than leaving the task to librarians alone.
Building on this same effort, the National Library began work on the
Nigerian Language Map in February 2024, a detailed project designed to record
which indigenous languages are spoken across each of Nigeria's thirty-six
states and the Federal Capital Territory. The map distinguishes languages that
belong naturally to a state from languages spoken by people who simply settled
there over time, and it shows that some Nigerian languages exist in only one
state while others stretch across as many as seven states. Prof. Anunobi
personally presented this map to the Honourable Minister of Education,
explaining that the project would help the library track its own progress in
revitalising languages that face the danger of dying out. The Minister praised
the project and noted that language sits at the very heart of what a person and
a community truly are, a sentiment that captures exactly why this kind of
documentation work carries so much weight for our national identity.
Partnership work of this kind naturally extends beyond Nigeria's own
borders, and the National Library has pursued several international
collaborations that support its cultural preservation goals. The library
renewed a Memorandum of Understanding with the National Library of the Republic
of Bulgaria, an agreement built around exchanging indigenous literature and
strengthening cultural ties between the two nations. Prof. Anunobi also
represented Nigeria at the National Libraries Forum held in Rome, where she
discussed possible collaboration with EBSCO Information Services on artificial
intelligence driven metadata enrichment and stronger digital research
infrastructure for Nigerian institutions. These international conversations
matter because they bring fresh tools and fresh funding opportunities back
home, resources that can then support the harder, more local work of
documenting heritage community by community.
Digitisation skills also need to reach beyond the walls of the National
Library itself, and one clear example of this is the collaboration between the
National Library and the Daily Trust Foundation. Together, these two
organisations conducted training sessions aimed at journalists and digital
marketers, teaching them practical skills in document digitisation so that more
Nigerians outside the library profession could contribute to preserving records
and materials. Spreading this kind of technical knowledge more widely means
that heritage documentation no longer depends only on a small number of trained
librarians working from a handful of offices in Abuja. Instead, a much larger
circle of citizens gains the ability to capture, digitise, and safely store cultural
material before it disappears through neglect or simple accident.
State branches of the National Library play a quiet but essential role in
connecting the institution to traditional leaders and local communities across
the country. These branches, found in states such as Nasarawa, Akwa Ibom,
Kwara, Plateau, Kaduna, and many others, organise readership campaigns,
cultural exhibitions, and community outreach programmes that bring library
staff face to face with the people whose stories need saving. Branch staff
often provide translation support and offer consultancy services to local
institutions, building the kind of trust that makes families and traditional
leaders willing to share private and sensitive family histories. Without this
steady, patient, local presence, the more visible national projects like the
Nigerian Language Map would struggle to gather the raw material they depend on.
The National Library has also worked to strengthen its legal foundations
and its physical archives, recognising that digital preservation only works
well when it rests on solid organisational structures. Prof. Anunobi has pushed
for the review of the National Library Act of 1970, arguing that some of its
older provisions have slowed down the institution's ability to carry out its
expanding mandate in a fast changing digital environment. At the same time, the
library has worked to expand and strengthen its archives, intensify its legal
deposit drive, and improve how it acquires materials such as government
gazettes and official publications. These structural reforms may not attract as
much public attention as a language map or a training workshop, yet they quietly
determine whether all this preservation work can actually last for the long
term.
Readership promotion campaigns held across Nigerian states also help
build the public trust that heritage preservation ultimately depends on, since
communities need to believe their stories will be handled with genuine care and
respect. Branch offices in states such as Borno, Katsina, and Ondo have
organised readership drives, book donations, and stakeholder engagement
meetings that bring library staff directly into contact with local communities
and their leaders. These gatherings give ordinary citizens, including
traditional leaders and elders, a chance to see firsthand how the library
treats the materials people choose to share with it. Trust built this way,
slowly and locally, matters just as much as any digital platform, because no
family or traditional ruler will hand over private heritage records to an
institution they do not yet trust.
Traditional institutions bring something to this partnership that
technology alone can never replace, and that is legitimacy inside their own
communities, a kind of trust built over generations of service and leadership.
When an oba, an emir, or a respected family head agrees to support a
documentation project, other community members tend to follow that example far
more readily than they would respond to a government directive alone. This is
precisely why the National Library's approach treats traditional leaders as
genuine partners in the preservation process rather than simply as sources to
be studied from the outside. A collaboration built on this kind of mutual
respect tends to produce richer, more accurate, and more complete records than
any purely top down approach ever could.
Looking at all these efforts together, a clear pattern begins to emerge,
one that shows a deliberate and sustained strategy rather than a series of
unrelated projects. The digitisation of records, the growth of the National
Repository, the language documentation training, the Nigerian Language Map, and
the steady work of state branches all point toward one shared goal, which is
making sure Nigerian heritage survives in a form future generations can
actually access and use. Prof. Anunobi's digital transformation agenda gave
this work a clear direction and a sense of institutional purpose, turning
scattered preservation efforts into something resembling a coordinated national
programme. That kind of coordination rarely happens by accident, and it
deserves recognition as one of the more significant achievements of her time
leading the institution.
None of this work comes without real difficulty, and it would be
dishonest to pretend the National Library faces no obstacles in carrying out
such an ambitious mission. Limited funding, staffing shortages, and gaps in
infrastructure across many branch locations continue to slow down the pace at
which digitisation and documentation projects can move forward. Wikipedia's own
summary of the institution notes ongoing challenges around outdated materials
and the need for better staff training to keep pace with fast moving technology
in the information sector. Recognising these limitations honestly, rather than
hiding them, actually strengthens the case for continued collaboration, since
no single institution, however well led, can preserve an entire nation's heritage
without steady support from government, communities, and international partners
alike.
Young Nigerians stand to gain the most from this quiet, steady work,
because they represent the generation who will either inherit a well documented
culture or inherit a set of fading memories nobody managed to write down in
time. A teenager researching their own family history today can search the
National Repository and potentially find recorded material connected to their
own language group or region, something that simply did not exist as an option
a decade ago. Students of history, culture, and linguistics now have digital
tools available that let them study indigenous knowledge systems without having
to travel across the country chasing scattered physical archives. This kind of
access changes what it means to grow up Nigerian, giving young people a stronger
and more direct connection to the traditions their grandparents once carried
only in memory.
The path ahead calls for even closer cooperation between the National
Library, traditional institutions, state governments, and everyday citizens who
hold pieces of family or community history worth preserving. Traditional rulers
and community leaders can continue opening doors for library staff, encouraging
families within their domains to come forward and share stories, records, and
artefacts that might otherwise remain hidden from public record. The National
Library, in turn, must keep investing in training, infrastructure, and outreach
so that every state branch has the tools needed to carry out this delicate work
with the professionalism and sensitivity it truly deserves. Neither side can
succeed alone, and the strength of this entire preservation effort rests on
both parties treating each other as equal and necessary partners in a shared
national project.
Saving Nigeria's heritage was never going to be a task for one
institution acting on its own, no matter how well funded or well organised that
institution might be. It requires librarians willing to travel, elders willing
to speak, traditional rulers willing to open community records, and ordinary
citizens willing to trust an unfamiliar process with deeply personal family
history. The collaboration now growing between the National Library of Nigeria
and our traditional institutions offers real proof that this kind of joint
effort can work when everyone involved commits to the same patient, long term
goal. If this partnership continues to deepen in the years ahead, the
generations who come after us will inherit far more than buildings, laws, and
monuments; they will inherit the actual voice of who we were, preserved
carefully enough to still be heard clearly a hundred years from now.