Understand Nigeria one place at a time

Homeground is organised around places rather than around a news cycle. Every story here belongs to a town or a city, and every place has a page of its own that works as a small publication: what it is, what has been reported from it, who contributed, and where to go next.

That is a deliberate inversion of how a publication normally works. A conventional site files a piece under a desk and mentions where it happened. Here a story cannot exist without somewhere to belong to. The consequence is that the country is browsable by geography — all 19 places — rather than only by date.

What we are interested in

Places that are not Lagos and not Abuja. Lagos State appears here as Badagry; the Federal Capital Territory does not appear at all. That is a position, not an oversight. There is a great deal of Nigeria that is written about only when something goes wrong in it, and a publication built on place has to be willing to spend its attention elsewhere.

The work is meant to be useful to people at home, to people travelling, and to the diaspora — which mostly means being specific. Where a story can honestly tell you how to get somewhere or when to go, it does. Where it cannot, it says nothing rather than inventing practicalities.

Photographs

Every photograph on this site is a freely-licensed image from Wikimedia Commons, credited to its photographer with the licence and a link to the file page it came from, so any credit here can be checked against its source. Nothing is generated. During sourcing, candidate images were rejected for being synthetic, and others for being the River Niger in the Republic of Niger rather than in Nigeria.

This is a stopgap. A publication like this should run on commissioned photography, and the code is arranged so that switching to it is a change to one file.

Reading on a slow connection

Homeground is photography-led, which is expensive on a metered connection. Every page has a text-only toggle in the header and the footer: it collapses each photograph to its caption and drops the web fonts. The setting is remembered, and it is applied before the page paints, so nothing loads that you did not ask for.

Corrections

Corrections are published on the story they belong to, dated, saying what was wrong and what it now says. They are not quietly edited in.

• 22 July 2026 — The last indigo pits at Kofar Mata: An earlier version said the pits were sunk in 1948. They date from 1498.

This is a prototype

It should be said plainly, because the rest of the site is written as though it were real. The places, the coordinates, the photographs and their credits are genuine. The reporting is not: the bylines are placeholders, the quotes are written rather than recorded, and no contributor named here is a real person. None of it should be read as journalism or cited as fact.

What is real is the structure — the content model, the place-first architecture and the design system. Replacing the seed content with reported work is a change to the content layer and nothing else.

Contact

Letters and corrections: post@homeground.ng. Contributors are listed on the contributors page.