Samuel “Smish” Ishola’s “Ordinary Nigerians in History” Humanizes Memory Through Storytelling

Early in the year, the Archivi.ng team asked a simple question: “What happens when a group of curious individuals are given access to the archives and enabled to do deep work?” This question was followed by a submission call to innovatively answer the question. There were numerous submissions but four Nigerian made the first cohort of the Archivi.ng Fellowship. Oghosa Anthony Ebengho’s Yellow Sunset, Aima Ojeamiren’s No Way Home: The Genesis of the Exodus, Shalom Kasim’s Documenting the Story Behind Black Orpheus and Samuel Ishola’s Ordinary Nigerians in History are the four selected projects.  

The first cohort’s projects ran between January and June 2025, and has produced a podcast, a documentary, an animated short film, and an ongoing literary investigation. In Ishola’s three-part podcast, Ordinary Nigerians in History, he challenges what it means to tell the everyday stories of everyday Nigerians pushed out of popular and mainstream media coverage and narrative. The narrative-style podcast uses archival materials to focus on the stories of working-class Nigerians and characters that spans from the pre-amalgamation era to the post-independence period. The episodes include Adeola’s Dirge, The Ordinance, and The Wedding That Never Happened. 

In this conversation with Ishola, he talks about the project, archival and documentation challenges he encountered, his thoughts on celebrity culture media coverage and Nigerians’ interest in Nigerian history. 

This interview has been edited for clarity. 

Ordinary Nigerians in History was officially released a month ago. What has been the response to it? 

The response has been incredible, honestly, far beyond what I expected. I’ve always seen history as a bit of a niche topic, so I didn’t anticipate this level of connection. But right from the release date, the feedback has been steady and deeply encouraging. I thought the excitement might fade after a week or two, but it hasn’t. 

I’m proud of the work itself, but what’s most rewarding is seeing how it’s awakening curiosity in people who never considered themselves interested in history. Just this week, someone messaged me saying she never knew such stories existed and that the podcast had changed the way she sees Nigerian history. Over the past month, I’ve seen people whom I had previously thought to have had little interest in history suddenly engage and ask questions. It’s proof that Nigerians want to understand Nigeria; we just need to tell the story in a way that feels alive and worth listening to.

The podcast featured the quotidian stories of working-class Nigerians from as far back as 1888. Can you talk about what guided choosing to tell these stories of these Nigerians?

It really came down to access and availability at the start. When the Archivi.ng fellowship began, I designed a grading template to help evaluate potential stories using a consistent set of criteria. Broadly, the guiding idea was that each story had to focus on characters who weren’t connected to existing power structures at the time, which is the whole premise of Ordinary Nigerians. I was interested in narratives that hadn’t been overexposed or romanticized in contemporary discourse. After all, there’s little value in retelling stories that already dominate the historical conversation.

On a more detailed level, I used specific, measurable criteria: the strength and clarity of the story itself; the availability of corroborating archival evidence beyond the main source; potential social and cultural impact; ease of execution; and inclusivity, ensuring representation across genders, ethnicities, and geopolitical zones. Each factor was scored numerically, and from a pool of 19 stories, I narrowed it down to six.

The original plan was to feature one story from each of Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones, but the archives didn’t cooperate in that sense. There was far more documented material from the South West and South South than from other regions. So, rather than force artificial balance, I decided to organize the series by time period instead. This first volume focuses on pre-amalgamation (pre-1914) stories, and the next, which we’re already developing, will cover the post-amalgamation to pre-independence era. The second volume will be out by Q1 next year, and one episode monthly after that. 

The intimate experiences of working-class Nigerians are the narrative core of the project. What do you believe is the greatest cultural and historical injustice perpetuated by the overwhelming contemporary celebrity culture media coverage? How does this contemporary media habit perpetuate the erasure of ordinary Nigerians as witnessed in the colonial archives? 

The most significant injustice in our contemporary celebrity culture media coverage, in my opinion, is that it reinforces a much older pattern of erasure. Most of history is political history, and therefore, the exclusive domain of the elite, so for centuries, power has dictated what gets recorded, archived, and remembered. Historically, writers, artists, scribes, poets, and others were often protégés of the royal court or wards of the powerful. As a result, they did not represent the perspectives of ordinary people, who often bore the brunt of the actions and inactions of these elites. Consequently, what appears in history’s pages are often edicts, laws, and “heroic” actions of a select few, but not the societal reactions or even counteractions that often accompany them.

Contemporary celebrity culture reproduces that logic. It funnels attention and narrative energy towards a tiny elite while the lived experiences of ordinary Nigerians remain largely unrecorded. Their stories exist, but because the machinery of attention is built to serve the top 1-5%, the outcome is a narrowing of the documented Nigerian experience. Thus, history becomes a parade of notable names, landmark events, and political milestones, while the everyday realities that truly define a society gradually fade from view.

What results is a form of cultural and narrative distortion. Looking back at Nigeria in the early 1900s, one sees headlines about colonial administrators, governors, and naive legislators, along with mentions of amalgamations, ordinances, and larger policies. Yet, millions of Nigerians were living, loving, working, resisting, and shaping the country’s texture, but most of their stories were never recorded. Today, we risk repeating that same mistake by creating a future archive filled with celebrity gossip, viral content, and elite narratives, while the intimate experiences of working-class Nigerians remain unseen.

In many ways, this is what I hoped to address with the Ordinary Nigerians in History podcast. 

In your view, what are the cultural and political effects of this media erasure? 

Culturally, it creates a distorted sense of who we are and what matters. When the most amplified perspectives are those of celebrities, politicians and the elite, we inadvertently begin to mistake visibility for value. The daily struggles, creativity and resilience of ordinary Nigerians, who make up 95 – 99% of the population, begin to fade from our collective memory. Over time, this weakens our sense of shared identity, replacing a diverse, national story with a narrow, performative one. I believe it also breeds a sort of cultural amnesia, where future generations inherit a version of Nigeria defined by spectacle rather than substance.

Politically, the consequences are even worse. Erasure produces silence, and silence protects power. When working-class lives are invisible, their needs and aspirations are easily ignored. Policy debates become detached from reality and are instead shaped by elite interests and preset media narratives. In such a climate, inequality feels natural, even inevitable, because the people most affected by it rarely appear as full characters in our shared story.

The podcast’s episodes focus on intimate real-life events and how it shapes cultural and political movements in Nigerian history. How important do you think singular personal tragedies, like the ones in the podcasts, are important in manifesting as a collective political or cultural movement? 

I believe most collective political and cultural movements are, at their core, born out of personal tragedies. That’s really where the power of storytelling lies. Individual experiences often become the emotional spark that transforms private pain into public action. When a social issue has been simmering beneath the surface for a while, it usually takes one deeply human, relatable event to tip it into the collective consciousness.

We saw this clearly during the #EndSARS movement. I remember joining smaller #EndSARS protests in Ibadan as far back as 2017, but it was the killing of a young man by SARS officers in Delta State in 2020 that pushed it into national outrage. That singular tragedy gave a face, a name, and an emotion to what had long been a diffuse anger.

It’s the same dynamic explored in Episode 1 of Ordinary Nigerians in History, Adeola’s Dirge. Adeola’s death from ill-treatment at a colonial hospital wasn’t the first of its kind, but her story struck a nerve. It became the catalyst that forced colonial authorities to confront and eventually reform their healthcare system. At least five others had died in similar circumstances, yet it was her story that moved people to act.

This is why I see storytelling as essential, because it humanizes memory. By focusing on intimate, individual experiences, we help society see the patterns of injustice hiding in plain sight. One person’s story, when told well, can awaken the conscience of a generation.

Documentation and archiving is at the core of this project. And, colonial archives are often characterized by its colonial gaze. How do you, as a researcher and writer, filter through these archives to extract the voices and authentic cultural experiences of the ordinary Nigerians whose stories you spotlighted? 

It’s really a process of careful juxtaposition. From the very beginning, I knew I didn’t want to rely solely on colonial records because they almost always reflect the worldview of the colonialists who wrote them. So one of my earliest decisions was to prioritize primary sources documented by Nigerians themselves, especially ordinary Nigerians. These firsthand accounts, though fewer, offered a more grounded and culturally honest lens. I then placed them side by side with academic journals, colonial newspapers, and other secondary materials to provide context, contrast, and nuance.

Secondly, by telling these stories, I try to examine larger systems and institutions, using ordinary Nigerians as driving characters. For example, Adeola’s Dirge isn’t only about Adeola’s tragic death. It’s also the story of how colonial healthcare in Nigeria evolved. The Ordinance focuses on Samuel and Wayin, but beneath their love story lies an exploration of the Native House Rule Ordinance, which essentially repackaged slavery under British administration. And The Wedding That Never Happened reveals both Dr. Sapara’s moral contradictions and the shifting institution of marriage in colonial Lagos.

So filtering through the archives meant constantly finding points of intersection, where the colonial record, the Nigerian voice, and the human story overlap. It’s about reading between the lines, questioning tone and intent, and pulling out the fragments that feel most authentic to the lived experiences of ordinary Nigerians, even when the archives themselves try to obscure them.

There are historical gaps you had to fill while writing the podcast scripts. Can you describe a moment where you had to make presumptions about an historical event and how were you able to ethically address that?

First, I think it’s important to say that whenever I make a presumption or fill a gap, I make it clear to the listener. That’s why there’s always a caveat at the start of each episode, so people understand when they’re hearing an interpretation rather than an established fact. History is a very touchy topic, particularly because the ripple effect travels across generations. Some of the characters I addressed in the episodes have progenitors who are alive and might be listening today, so I try as much as possible to be transparent. I never want my assumptions to be mistaken for archival truth.

A good example of this came in Episode 3, The Wedding That Never Happened. The story was built around the Adel vs. Sapara and Green case from 1911, which I initially followed through newspaper reports. But at some point, the trail went cold, and I couldn’t find any official conclusion in other accessible sources. The story itself was too significant to abandon, so I decided to bridge that gap using corroborative hints from later records and contextual evidence. I found proof that Dr. Sapara and Ms. Green never married, so I made an intentional narrative leap and acknowledged it in the episode. I later found solid, corroborating evidence, but as at the time of writing, that wasn’t yet confirmed.

Ethically, my approach is to treat these moments with honesty and restraint. History isn’t always complete, but part of the historian’s duty is to navigate those silences responsibly. One always has to imagine carefully, not invent recklessly. In the end, I chose to leave the story as originally told, partly because it was dramatically compelling, but mostly because it reflected the uncertainty that so often surrounds the lives of ordinary Nigerians in the archives.

What do you see as the biggest cultural and political challenge facing the preservation and accessibility of Nigerian historical archives today, and what message do you hope your work sends to both the government and the wider Nigerian public about the intrinsic importance of these documents? 

The biggest cultural and political challenge facing the preservation and accessibility of Nigerian historical archives today is the lack of value we collectively attach to memory. Our institutions treat archives as relics to be stored rather than as living repositories of national consciousness. Politically, this neglect is tied to a culture of secrecy and control: access to records is often restricted, fragmented, or poorly maintained, reflecting a fear of accountability and a failure to see history as a public right. Culturally, many Nigerians have been conditioned to view archives as the domain of academics, rather than as tools for understanding who we are and how we got here.

My work challenges that mindset. It argues that archives are instruments of truth, identity, and justice. By focusing on the stories of ordinary Nigerians, I want to show that our history is not complete until it includes the voices and textures of everyday life, and that safeguarding archives is an act of governance, not charity. It is how a nation preserves its legitimacy and continuity. And to the wider public, my message is that these documents belong to all of us. They are our collective inheritance, and our silence toward their decay is a subtle form of self-erasure.

The individual actions and inactions of the podcasts’ subjects motivated public actions that led to policy change. In contemporary Nigerian society, what lessons do you think Nigerians can pick from these stories?

The first lesson is that every story matters and that documentation is power. Many of the subjects in the podcast were ordinary people whose private choices, struggles, or even misfortunes went on to influence public change. Their stories remind us that history isn’t made only by politicians or elites, it’s also shaped by regular people who choose to act, speak up, or simply live with conviction.

For me, the most important takeaway for Nigerians today is the need to record our own lives, no matter how ordinary they seem. A lot of what I know about history comes from memoirs, often written by people who weren’t famous or powerful but whose reflections helped fill in the human side of major events. These personal records add depth, context, and perspective to the historical narrative.

That’s why I always encourage people to document their experiences through journals, photos, letters, or even the intentional use of social media. I genuinely believe that most people should write a memoir at some point, not for fame, but to leave behind their version of our collective story. Because without those individual stories, history risks becoming a list of events and dates, stripped of the people, choices, and lives that truly shaped it.