News

The National Museum of Unity and IFRA-Nigeria are organising an event with the theme “Make Your Medicine: Heritage, Culture and Health”, under the FEF Alternative Heritage Project. The event will feature two guest lectures and a participatory hands-on workshop that centres on tangible and intangible aspects of these cultural heritage and practices, fostering a deeper understanding of their significance and impact.

Date: 06 May 2026

Place: National Museum of Unity, Aleshinloye, Ibadan

Time: 10:00 AM, preceded by an immersion session at 9:00 AM

Between 2 to 6 November 2026, the seventh edition of the Itinerant Doctoral School (EDI) will take place at Félix Houphouët-Boigny University in Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire). This doctoral school is a partnership between the Institut de recherche sur le Maghreb contemporain (IRMC – Tunis), the Institut français de recherche en Afrique (IFRA – Nigeria), the Centre Jacques Berque (CJB – Rabat), the Scientific Interest Group “Pensées Genre Penser Autrement” (GIS – PGPA) of Félix Houphouët-Boigny University, and Alassane Ouattara University.

Doctoral students in social sciences enrolled in a PhD program at a university or research institution located in an African country can apply to participate in the doctoral school.

Application deadline: June 10, 2026 

Download the full call in English

Download the full call in French

From 13 - 16 April 2026, IFRA-Nigeria convened a multidisciplinary masterclass on vernacular architecture, bringing together scholars in architecture, history, sociology, urban geography and ethnography. The session explored how Nigeria’s built environment not only shelters life but also reflects cultural adaptation, social transformation and acts of resistance.

At the heart of the discussions was a shared understanding: vernacular architecture is far more than a collection of structures. It is a living archive of memory, identity and everyday practice. Often described as an “indigenous” science of building, it draws on local materials and techniques, as well as an accumulated knowledge, evolving through experimentation and engagement with changing environments. As architectural historian Paul Oliver famously observed, it is “a building of people, made by the people.”

IFRA-Nigeria and the National Museum of Unity, Ibadan are organising an event on “Arts of Fashion and Textile Heritage”, under the FEF Alternative Heritage Project. The event aims to provide a comprehensive exploration of Nigerian textile and fashion heritage, highlighting the diversity, cultural significance and contemporary relevance of these traditions. The event will feature a week-long exhibition, a guest lecture and a participatory workshop that centres on tangible and intangible aspects of these cultural heritage and practices, fostering a deeper understanding of their significance and impact. 

On 21 April, IFRA-Nigeria welcomed Dr Mark Van de Velde, linguist and CNRS researcher currently working at IFRA-Nigeria, for our monthly methodological seminar. His presentation focused on the “Jarawa project”, a five-year research project funded by the French National Agency for Research (ANR), which will study the languages of the Jarawan family, in North-East Nigeria.

On 10 March 2026, the National Museum of Unity in Ibadan and IFRA-Nigeria hosted their latest event “Materiality, Performance, and Cultural Essence of Masquerades and Festivals” as part of the Nigerian Alternative Heritages project. It featured talks, performances and dialogue that centres on tangible and intangible of Nigerian cultures, fostering a deeper understanding of their significance and impact. There were over 140 people in attendance, including about 70 students and pupils.

Over the past two years, the Nigerian Alternative Heritages project has engaged in critical inquiry, digital documentation, and workshops to highlight marginalized cultural expressions. 

On 21 April, Dr Mark Van de Velde, linguist at the CNRS and currently based at IFRA-Nigeria, will join us for our April methodological seminar, where he will delve into the specific methods of linguistic research. To do so, he will use the example of his current project on the languages of the Jarawan family, of which only about a dozen still survive today. 

Although these languages have fascinated linguists and historians since the beginning of the 20th century, none of them has been properly studied. The reason for this fascination is the oft-repeated claim that the Jarawan languages may belong to the Narrow Bantu family, despite their location in Northern Nigeria and the important differences between their grammatical structures and those of the Bantu languages.

The goals of the JARAWA project are (i) to thoroughly analyse the grammatical structures of the Jarawan languages of Nigeria, (ii) to achieve a reliable external genealogical classification, (iii) to elaborate a partial reconstruction of Proto-Jarawan; and (iv) to create a rich, publicly accessible linguistic documentation.

On 31 March, IFRA-Nigeria welcomed Dr Shina Alimi, associate professor from the Department of History at Obafemi Awolowo University, for our March methodological seminar.

Dr Shina Alimi began his career as a historian with the exploration of print media, and progressively developed the notion that it is necessary to go beyond the surface of the colonial archives, to understand the silences of history. Looking for unconventional sources of knowledge, he turned to colonial advertisements, in particular those dedicated to medical or hygiene products, asking: how did colonial advertisements medicalise black bodies? How did this make the body an object to be reformed through consumption? Can we read advertisements as ethnographic archives?

After six months of meticulous work, the Ogunsheye Foundation team, under the leadership of Adejoke Rafiat Adetoro, has successfully completed the cleaning, scanning, renaming, and metadata creation for the first 250 folders of the Ogunsheye Foundation's invaluable archival collection.

This milestone includes materials from two extraordinary collections: Professor Felicia Adetowun Ogunsheye'sarchive, which documents women's activism in Nigeria and its international connections from the 1940s to the present. Professor Ayo Fidelis Ogunsheye's archive, which explores Nigeria's economic history and the development of adult education in the country.

Find out more about the project on its dedicated page: Ogunsheye Foundation Project.

Scroll to see some pictures of the last months' work.

The Plateia journal released its latest issue intitled "Emergences Patrimoniales", which explores the question of what we consider as "heritage", and in particular "architectural heritage". This notion is currently being reconfigured, with the rise of "alternative heritages", from Europe to Africa. The issue was directed by former IFRA-Nigeria director, Barbara Morovich, and Géraldine Djament. 

Two articles of the issues are dedicated to Nigeria heritage in particular. First, Sébastien Jacquot, Marie Morelle et Émilie Guitard - former IFRA Deputy Director and head of the INFRAPATRI project - published Identifier des relations infrapatrimoniales – Usages, savoirs et attachements autour du végétal à Ìbàdàn (Nigeria) et à Yaoundé (Cameroun). Barbara Morovich and Sa'eed Husaini from the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) share an essay on the Promises and Perils of Participation in Digital Restitution Projects in Nigeria.

You can find out more about the issue here: https://pus.unistra.fr/ouvrage/plateia-n5-2025/

Dr Delphine Manetta, IFRA’s deputy director, will hold a panel at the Lagos Studies Association Conference 2026 focusing on the role of care in the construction of masculinities in Africa, but proposing several shifts in perspective from the literature from a perspective that emerged with Western scholars to one more centered on African perspectives. 

Date & Time: 20 June, 3:45pm - 5:15pm

Venue: E-library

You will find below the details of the panelists.

IFRA-Nigeria is organizing a masterclass tailored for Master’s students and PhD candidates in Ibadan with a keen interest in architectural and cultural research between 13 and 16 April. This workshop will concentrate on the essentials of conducting rigorous research and will offer hands-on training in the exploration of Nigerian vernacular architecture.

Download the call here or read it below

The deadline was extended to 13 March 2026.

On Tuesday 31 March, we welcome Dr Shina Alimi, associate professor in the Department of History at Obafemi Awolowo University for our March methodological seminar titled "Medicalised Black Bodies in Colonial Advertisements: An Ethnographic Lens". In his research, Dr Alimi's can be summarised by a series of questions : how did colonial advertisements medicalise Black bodies and transform them into objects of therapeutic intervention, racial knowledge, and consumer marketing? In what ways did colonial advertisements construct Black bodies as sites of pathology, hygiene, or therapeutic intervention? How did advertising imagery reproduce or reinforce ideas derived from colonial scientific fields such as anthropology, tropical medicine, and colonial medicine? Can advertisements be read as ethnographic archives that reveal colonial attitudes toward African bodies and environments? How might reading colonial advertisements ethnographically challenge the silences in colonial medical archives?

Practical information:

Date & Time: Tuesday 31 March, 10am to 12pm

Location: IFRA-Nigeria's Resource Centre

Link for registration (deadline for application: 26/03/2026): https://forms.gle/b8fP7X5fKPS2VN2HA

On 26 February 2026, IFRA-Nigeria and the Institute of African Studies (IAS) of the University of Ibadan, co-hosted the newest conference in our “Imagine(d) Africa” series. Dr Kudus Adebayo, from the IAS, held a presentation titled “In the Shadows of Global Migration and Deportation: Nigerian men in search of livelihood in China”. Prof. Rasheed Olaniyi, from the Department of History of the University of Ibadan, was his discussant.