About Us
Nigeria’s technological history
Teko Archives is a digital archive project that seeks to document and preserve Nigeria’s technological history.
Popular narratives of Africa’s digital technology revolution often celebrate the contemporary moment as the beginning of technology innovation on the African continent. Using newspaper articles and advertisements, oral history interviews, photographs, and other relevant materials, this project challenges the ahistorical nature of these popular narratives by examining the personal computer boom of the late eighties and nineties in Lagos, Nigeria.
The first phase of this project tells the story of this early history of technology entrepreneurship in Lagos. Although the Lagos personal computer boom occurred between 1985 and 1999, the archive will also include materials from the early history of computing in Nigeria, thus expanding the timeline from 1960 to 1999. The next phase will build on this foundational history and document the ongoing events of Lagos tech startup ecosystem.
The first phase began in September 2020 led by Kanyinsola Obayan during her postdoctoral fellowship at MIT Digital Humanities Lab. Both, Dr. Obayan, and her Lagos-based research assistant, Sholagbade Abiola, conducted archival research at the Guardian Library and IBM archives along with oral history interviews with former technology company owners and employees, IT journalists, and other connected individuals.
In so doing, this project hopes to advance contemporary and future scholarship on digital technology in Africa by providing researchers, community members, and policymakers with an accessible historical record for their use.
A team of undergraduate students (Karen Andre, Irina Zoccolini, Yeabsira Moges, Alexis Yi, and Keilee Northcutt) and the Digital Humanities Lab staff also contributed to the project’s design and development. In particular, undergraduates created metadata, edited interview transcripts, planned and implemented the website design
The project was generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Programs in Digital Humanities at MIT and an Association of Computing Machinery History Fellowship.
Dr. Kanyinsola Obayan is the founder of the Teko Archives project. She is currently the Faculty Lead of the Africa General Program at the Lauder Institute at The University of Pennsylvania and formerly served as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at MIT. Her primary intellectual interests lie at the intersections of Africana Studies, digital humanities, and science and technology studies, where she investigates the sociocultural implications of technology entrepreneurship in contemporary Africa using Lagos, Nigeria as a point of departure. She received her Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Cornell University. Kanyinsola also attended The University of Texas at Austin, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations and Global Studies, as well as in African and African Diaspora Studies. She is also the founder and Executive Director of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, Orisun Collective, which holds summer camps in the creative arts for secondary school students in Lagos, Nigeria.
