The Nigerian cultural space has never been louder. More platforms, more voices, more people positioning themselves as the definitive authority on what is happening - in music, in fashion, in film, in beauty, in everything. Documentation is happening at a scale and speed that previous generations could not have imagined. The record being built, however, is incomplete, distorted, and increasingly disconnected from what actually happened. The question is why and the answer is older than TikTok. 

African culture has always lived primarily in the oral tradition. The archive was never a library. It existed amongst the people who orchestrated the careful passing of knowledge through speech and memory. That is not a failure of the African intellectual tradition. It is a different system, with its own rigour and its own logic. The vulnerability it creates, however, is specific: without a unified written record, cultural discourse can never be fully settled.  The "owambe" versus "owanbe" debate illustrates this precisely - a spelling dispute rooted in the Yoruba phrase "Ó wà ní ibẹ̀", meaning "the place where it is at," that has persisted for decades because there is no definitive written record to resolve it. Both spellings exist. Both are used by journalists, by academics, by everyday Nigerians on social media. The argument continues across platforms, dinner tables, and comment sections. No version has won because no authoritative written record exists to settle it. Nobody has the receipt. The digital age had the opportunity to address this vulnerability. Instead, it inherited it and made it worse.

A generation of young creatives has arrived with platforms, visibility, and the confidence to fill the documentation gap. The access that previous generations fought for is being used. That matters. The language that travels with that access, however, tells a different story. "We are the future." "We are here to take over." "Embrace the youth." These phrases carry a common assumption: that the story begins here, with this generation, with this moment. The problem is that access without rigour is not documentation. It is noise with an audience. The platforms that have appointed themselves cultural authorities are often the same ones publishing first and thinking later, collapsing decades of work into a trending moment, and calling a viral post cultural currency. The bar for speaking on culture has never been lower. The consequences of getting it wrong have never been higher. 

The industry leaders carry the weight of this most directly. When they are not erased entirely, they are misplaced, dropped into lists of artists "defining current culture" as though their legacy can be collapsed into a present moment they are not part of. The emerging artists who should be owning this chapter are denied the space to do so. The industry leaders are stripped of the context that makes their legacy meaningful. When an industry leader has not released anything recently, the dismissal arrives quickly - years of work, influence, and cultural contribution reduced to irrelevance because the timeline moved on. The body of work does not disappear because the posting stopped. The legacy does not expire because the algorithm forgot. The same instinct that sent people to Google before AI existed - the basic desire not to sound uninformed, should apply here. 

The subjects that suffer most are the ones where being wrong carries no immediate consequences. Fashion. Music. Tech. Anyone can position themselves as an authority in these spaces, rarely getting caught because the knowledge is diffuse and the audience is not always specialist enough to push back. Sit the same person in front of a conversation about architecture or art history and the errors are visible immediately. The specialist audience is unforgiving. There is a reason people are more careful in those spaces. In the spaces where accountability is low, it takes one reel from someone who genuinely knows what they are talking about to cut through everything else not because the bar is high, but because it is so low that genuine knowledge becomes remarkable. When Deji Osikoya posted a video asking why Nigerian music discourse had overlooked Wale’s contribution to Afrobeats, the reel did not just go viral. It started a conversation that eventually reached Wale himself. That is what proper cultural documentation looks like - researched, specific, and consequential. It should not be the exception.

The impact of this carelessness is not abstract. People make decisions from what these platforms publish - career decisions, cultural judgments, aesthetic choices. A young creative reading a carelessly assembled list might spend years chasing a standard that was never accurately described. A music history written without its architects is a music history that cannot be trusted. An archive built on exaggeration is not documentation. It is mythology dressed in screenshots.

The solution is not complicated. Research before publishing. Understand the difference between what is current and what is legacy. Distinguish between a moment and a movement, between virality and relevance, between an industry leader's body of work and a newcomer's debut. In the bid to document culture, document it properly - with the care of someone who understands that what goes on record becomes the record.

Somewhere, there should be a library. A proper one - for the music, the fashion, the film, the photography, the art. As definitive as a dictionary. A reference you can point to. One that settles the argument. 

IG: @sophiannadozie
Credit: Leroy Campbell (The Nod)