Yewande Oyebo

Look, I get that people are pissed about this thing—there’s a lot to be mad about. But I was raised by a civil servant, and time and again, I’ve learned that systems collapse gradually, not all at once. Nobody shows up on their first day of work and decides to destroy archives or anything. Quite often, it’s a series of small decisions, small things we let fester here and there. Culture is whatever a system rewards or punishes. But the thing about Nigeria is that while we’re always late to one party (the things we’ve lost are lost), I think it’s important to know we’re also always early to another. So much has been lost, but so much can still be done. And it doesn’t have to be big things; just pick the little things. For example, if someone in your family was a teenager when Nigeria became independent, statistically, they might be dead in a decade or way less. Sit with them and press record; they have so much to say, and so few people willing to listen. Just listen and press record. In whatever language they understand, no matter how little your understanding of it. Keep the family album. Use your phone to photograph them. Keep the tapes. Much of what our civilisation learned about fighting COVID-19 came from what we learned about the Spanish Flu of 1918: a mix of official records documenting death rates, etc., and personal correspondence that captured the experience of living through it. Personal history is family history is national history.