The National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) in collaboration with Telecoms giants, IHS Nigeria has launched the national digital museum at a posh event at The Hall, Victoria Island, Lagos to promote access and develop Nigerian’s art and cultural heritage.
The digital museum, which has the noble objective of using technology to innovatively bring Nigeria’s art and monuments across museums in the country provides Nigerians over 200 artifacts from different museums in Nigeria, with 3D scanned models embedded in a virtual environment and detailed descriptions. These are all accessible through the NCMM website at www.museum.ng.
In her remarks, Barrister Hannatu Musa Musawa, Honourable Minister of Arts, Culture Tourism and the Creative Economy, while speaking at the event said, “We will never have the ability to know where we came from if we do not preserve our artifacts and those expressions of our forefathers.
“And now as the world continues to become a global village, somehow that is a great thing, but it has also been a detriment to us as a people because we have lost our identity and who we are and what makes us so dynamic and special as a people lies in those values, those traditions, those cultures that are well articulated in our monuments or the expressions within our monuments and in our museums.
“One of the ways that you can educate your people about who you are as a people is by telling your stories yourselves. Now, your ability to take what was ours or our history of growing up and take it to the next generation and offer it to a wider global community that can appreciate our struggles as a people and our brilliance as a people. That our ancestors had the ability to create the kind of art form that scientists still do not understand how they made it, I think it’s something that is going to live beyond the ages”, she added.
Earlier in his welcome address, Olugbile Holloway, Director General of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM), “Tonight, we stand at a remarkable crossroads, the meeting place of history and innovation, where centuries of cultural treasures have been borne through the power of digital technology, ensuring our stories are not just remembered, but experienced, not just studied, but felt, not just archived, but alive across generations. Together, we will witness tradition embracing transformation and history taking its rightful place in the future. As the African proverb says, until the lion learns to speak, the story will not be glorified. This evening, the NCNF ensures that our lives, our artifacts, our sites, our stories, have found their voice, and the world is ready to listen.
“The Nigerian artifacts that we have, unfortunately, over the past years have not been kept or presented in such a way that would appeal to the modern Nigeria, the Nigeria of today. And as you say, if you want to go fast, you go alone, but if you want to go far, you go with someone. The digitization exercise for us is our attempt to preserve our artifacts for generations to come. Not just preserve the artifacts, but how do we make them more relatable, more accessible, and easy to digest at every level. So, if you contact a museum, why not use technology to build museums? That, for us, was the core thinking behind the creation of the digital museum.
In his speech, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Vice President of IHS Towers Nigeria, Mr. Mohamad Darwish stated, “The issue that I see with our children and brothers and sisters recently is we are detaching from our roots, partly because of telecommunication. We have opened the world to everyone. People see and they want to explore. So, sometimes it forgets where we come from, which is a big mistake. And this history, this treasure that we have, should not just stay in a place, in two places or five places. It should be available at a different figure for everybody to see, understand this art, and more importantly, understand the history behind this art”.
The Museums and Monuments is an agency of the federal government of Nigeria, responsible for the preservation, promotion, research, and development of Nigeria’s rich cultural heritage. Established as a department in the then Federal Ministry of Wars, the NCMM has under its purview a network of national museums across the country, some of which are the National Museum Lagos, Gidan Makama Museum in Calabar, National Museum Benin, Museum of Unity Ibadan, and the Borders Dense Museum in Calabar.
