Sunday 23rd, Aug; 2026

By Editor

#TheNworisaDoctrine 

There was a time when Nigeria did not have social media, WhatsApp groups or hundreds of online platforms competing every day to tell us who we are. Yet Nigerians were reading stories about themselves, about one another and about the society they were building. One of the publications that captured that era was DRUM. 

DRUM was not originally a Nigerian magazine. It emerged from South Africa in 1951 and eventually developed regional editions across Africa, including Nigeria. The Nigerian edition ran for decades and became an important record of Nigerian society, combining politics with photography, culture, fashion, music, sport, personalities and the ordinary experiences of African life. 

What fascinates me about DRUM today is not simply the magazine itself, but the question it leaves behind: what if Nigeria had a DRUM for every tribe? 

Imagine a publication whose purpose was not to tell us which tribe was better, whose politician was superior or whose grievance was greater, but to allow Nigerians to discover one another beyond the stereotypes we have inherited. 

Imagine an Igbo reader opening a story about an extraordinary Hausa entrepreneur in Kano. A Hausa reader discovering the history of an Ikwerre community in Rivers State. A Yoruba reader learning about the traditions of the Tiv. A young Nigerian in Kano discovering the story of a family from Cross River living and contributing to the city. Not as strangers. Not as statistics. But as people. 

That is one thing we sometimes underestimate about storytelling: you find it much harder to hate what you have taken the time to understand. 

DRUM documented political events, but it also documented people. It showed African societies through their fashion, music, relationships, ambitions, struggles, personalities and everyday lives. Its regional editions were not simply copies of one another; much of their content was locally produced for their respective audiences. 

That is the part of its legacy I think deserves to be revisited today. 

Nigeria has become extremely good at telling stories about conflict. We tell stories about who killed whom, which tribe did what, which region is marginalised and which politician belongs to which ethnic camp. Our social media algorithms reward outrage because outrage travels faster than understanding. 

But what if we deliberately built platforms that made Nigerians curious about Nigerians? 

What if alongside the political arguments, we documented the Igbo trader who has spent 30 years building a business in Kano? What if we told the story of the Hausa family that opened its home to neighbours from another part of the country? What if we documented the Yoruba teacher, the Ijaw entrepreneur, the Tiv farmer, the Kanuri student, the Nupe artisan and the Ikwerre professional not merely as representatives of their tribes, but as Nigerians whose individual stories form part of our collective story? 

Perhaps we would gradually begin to realise something that political arguments often make us forget: Nigeria is not only a country of 250 ethnic groups. It is a country of millions of individual stories constantly crossing those ethnic boundaries. 

And this is why I find the DRUM archive so fascinating today. We now have access to thousands of pages documenting African life from decades ago. Archivi.ng has digitised more than 3,000 pages of DRUM from the 1960s and 1970s, while the West African DRUM archive now being preserved by MOWAA contains more than 1,000 editions from Nigeria and Ghana. 

We can therefore look backwards and ask ourselves what we have lost. 

We have never lacked people willing to speak for their tribes. What we have lacked is enough people willing to tell the story of other people's tribes with the same dignity with which they tell their own. 

Maybe that is the DRUM we need today. 

Not a magazine that tells us that our differences do not exist. They do. 

Not a platform that pretends Nigeria has no grievances, injustices or difficult histories. We do. 

But a platform that says that before we reduce one another to a tribe, a religion, a political party or an accent, there is a human being whose story is worth knowing. 

Perhaps Nigeria does not need another platform for Nigerians to shout at one another. 

Perhaps we need more platforms that make us meet one another. 

What if Nigeria had a DRUM for every tribe? 

Maybe we would finally begin to hear the music of the whole country. 

Nworisa Michael is the coordinator of Inter-tribe Community Support Forum and writes from nworisamichael1917@gmail.com