Aims and objectives
The project aimed to digitise and document the collection of three kinds of endangered materials in the Lokoja area of Nigeria dated between 1841 and 1950. These include; the ecclesiastical records of the Lokoja Anglican and Catholic church; the commercial records of the early European trading companies; the burial records of European/ African missionaries, soldiers, and administrators refracted from the epitaphs in the colonial cemeteries and those housed in the National Commission for Museum and Monument store(NCMM) under state ministry of Culture and Tourism. Others include private/official correspondences and judiciary/Prison reports. These materials provide unique information that does not exist elsewhere.
Outcomes
The EAP1436 Team despite the challenges encountered during our operations was able to finish our activities as proposed in our application. We digitised over 80 digital files; 6,537 items including Baptismal logbooks, marriage certificates, and registers, minutes of meetings, Church diaries, reports and pamphlets, maps, Photographs, pictures of epitaphs on tombstones of European Soldiers, and liturgical documents, books, etc. In all, we digitised 194 gigabytes of materials. The volume of materials digitised, the age of the material, the diversity of themes covered, and the value of these materials are quite significant. These archival materials digitised are colonial materials and are more than sixty years old. They provide unique records that do not exist elsewhere. Present and future generations of researchers would find these records invaluable to their research, especially those that focus on the history of colonialism in Nigeria, Christian missions and missionary activities in Lokoja and Northern Nigeria at large, European soldiers in colonial Nigeria, etc.
