An Insight into the FKA Commons Upload Project

Somewhere within the pages of a fading, deteriorating mid-century Nigerian newspaper sits a hand-drawn advertisement for a local business, along with a political cartoon that captures the anxieties of its age. For decades, these images existed within newspapers located in physical libraries and archives, largely unseen. Then they were digitised, but it turns out that more could be done to make them even more visible.

In March 2026, Free Knowledge Africa launched the FKA Commons Upload Campaign to tackle exactly that gap. Over the last 3 years, Free Knowledge Africa has engaged in digitisation initiatives to make historical newspapers accessible online to a wider audience, and the pages of these newspapers have been embedded with more graphic images that tell interesting stories. We started this digitisation initiative to identify, digitise, and publish historical Nigerian newspapers that have entered the public domain. To date, the project has digitised 3,914 days of newspapers , amounting to over 43,000 pages (and keeps growing as this is an ongoing project) of Nigerian print history now freely accessible online. These Digitised newspapers can be found under the Commons category ‘Free Knowledge Africa’s Initiative with NLN Abuja‘

Running through April 2026, the two-month campaign mobilised 51 volunteers to do something equally exciting and valuable: dig into these digitised newspapers, find the illustrations, advertisements, and portraits embedded within them, crop them out, and re-upload each as a standalone discoverable file. By the time the campaign wrapped up, over 2,000 images had been added to Wikimedia Commons. This was a quiet yet significant expansion of freely accessible Nigerian visual heritage.

Long before wellness influencers and gut health TikToks, Nigerians in 1955 were already being sold the dream of internal cleanliness. Meet Beecham’s Pills, “the world-famous laxative”, that promised to remove “poisonous waste matter” and restore your happiness. Some things, it seems, never change.

A Sense of Discovery

This project drew on a remarkable collection of digitised Nigerian newspapers, some of which are no longer in existence or operation. Among these papers are iconic publications such as the West African Pilot , founded in 1937 by the former Nigerian president Nnamdi Azikiwe. This publication was well known for its attack on British colonial rule and pioneered entrepreneurial Black journalism, linking football with social justice and using sport to reinforce the growing unpopularity of colonisation. It evolved into a chain of newspapers, acquiring other titles like the Eastern Nigerian Guardian in 1940, the Nigerian Spokesman and the Southern Defender in 1943. In 1945, The Daily Comet was acquired by and converted into a daily newspaper before being transferred to Kano, where it became the first daily newspaper publication in Northern Nigeria. The paper went out of business in 1967 following the outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War.

Another iconic publication in this collection is the Daily Times , first printed on 1st June 1926 with Adeyemo Alakija as chairman and Ernest Ikoli as its first editor. In 1970, it became one of the most successful locally owned businesses in Africa, covering major moments in Nigerian history from the discovery of oil to the nation’s independence and the Civil War, before being sold to a private investor in 2024. The Daily Times newspaper is one of the few historical papers still actively publishing.

Another publication of honourable mention is the Nigerian Tribune , established in 1949 by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, well known as a key figure in Nigeria’s Independence movement. This paper was used to spread nationalist consciousness among Nigerians, and is the oldest privately owned Nigerian newspaper still in circulation.

These papers carried articles spanning the colonial and early post-independence eras, collectively documenting Nigerian public life across politics, commerce, culture, and society. Many of the participants had never come across these publications before. That sense of discovery, of stumbling across history while doing the technical work of metadata and file uploads, reiterated something important about what this kind of project makes possible. The images and files we upload to platforms like Wikimedia Commons are an invitation into a past that is still very much relevant.

“All wise mothers use Mentholatum Balm.” No pressure, mums. This 1950s advertisement, pulled from the pages of a Nigerian newspaper, is a window into how British consumer brands marketed themselves across colonial Nigeria. Same product, same pitch, thousands of miles from Slough, England, where it was made.

The campaign also built in incentives to encourage broad and diverse participation. Beyond prizes for the first, second, and third-highest contributors overall, a special prize category was introduced for participants who uploaded the most women’s portraits. This was a conscious effort to ensure that women’s presence in these historical newspapers was not overlooked during cropping and upload. This resulted in 86 women’s portraits uploaded to the Commons, a small but meaningful step toward a more complete and representative visual record of Nigerian history.

The Need for Digitisation

Like many community-driven open knowledge projects, this project wasn’t without its challenges. The original plan was to use the Croptool, a Wikimedia tool built exactly for this kind of work. The key advantage of the Croptool is its seamless integration. It automatically uploads cropped images to Wikimedia Commons while ensuring that the new file inherits the metadata and licensing description of its parent file, since these newspaper files had already been uploaded. This would have been a significant time-saver and a safeguard against incomplete and inaccurate metadata descriptions.

Unfortunately, the Croptool encountered technical difficulties during the campaign periods, and the team had to look for alternatives. Participants instead used a Screen Clip browser extension for Chrome, which allowed them to crop images directly from their screens, copy the cropped images, and paste them into the Upload Wizard without having to save each file locally on their devices. This alternative worked perfectly, but it introduced a layer of manual labour, as each cropped file had to be individually documented with metadata entered by hand to replace what the Croptool would have handled automatically.

This process served as a reminder that the infrastructure that supports open knowledge contribution matters enormously. Tools that lower the barrier to participation not only make campaigns easier, they also make them scalable, more accurate and more accessible to contributors who may not have deep technical experience.

“Too many Orange Squashes disappoint when you mix them in water or as short drinks. But Rose’s Orange Squash is a perfect mixer.” Nigerian newspapers of the 1950s didn’t just carry news, they carried the full flavour of an era. This one literally.

The manual workflow was not the only challenge we faced during this campaign. The quality of images within some of the newspapers proved to be a limiting factor. Not every imaged, cropped-out image met the upload requirements. Poor resolution, fading and physical deterioration of the original papers meant that a meaningful number of images had to be left behind. The 2,000-plus image files that made it to the commons are only the clearest, most usable fraction of what exists in these pages.

This points to a tension that anyone working at the intersection of GLAM and open knowledge will recognise. Every year that passes without high-quality digitisation of surviving copies is a year of irreversible loss, not just of texts but of the visual culture embedded within its pages. This is an argument for urgency, as better digitisation today means more to work with tomorrow.

It is worth noting that these images, contributed by 51 volunteers over two months, are now live on Wikimedia Commons, freely licensed, individually searchable, and available to anyone worldwide. These images can illustrate Wikipedia articles on Nigerian history, enrich educational materials, support academic research and educate curious members of the public. That is the core logic of the campaign: creating access not just in bulk, but in practice.

“Asepso fights infection – clears the skin.” Before the age of ten-step skincare routines and SPF discourse, a bar of Asepso soap was apparently doing it all. This advertisement, rescued from the pages of a Nigerian newspaper, has been quietly waiting decades to make its debut.

It is also important to note that there is still a lot ot be done. For this particular campaign, the newspapers used spanned five years, dating back to 1955. The digitised collection extends even beyond 1975 and continues to grow, encompassing two more decades of Nigerian history, with more advertisements, illustrations, photographs, and stories frozen within its pages, waiting to be found. There are visual records of Nigeria’s post-independence years, its political transformations, cultural shifts and everyday lives sitting in those pages. This campaign has shown that a motivated community of volunteers, given the right tools and coordination, can add even more visual heritage to the commons.

Explore the Collection

The images uploaded through the FKA Commons Upload Project are freely available on Wikimedia Commons. We invite researchers, educators, Wikipedia editors, and anyone interested in Nigerian history and visual culture to explore the collection, use the images, and help expand the metadata where possible