In May 1967, weeks before civil war, the cover of DRUM Magazine’s Nigeria edition asked: “Nigeria’s Future: Is peace possible?” The question sat beside a cover girl in a sleeveless dress. That was DRUM: politics and glamour, crime and football, prophecy and fashion, side by side and for the same shilling.

Cover Stories returns those pages to where DRUM always lived: in public. From 2 November 2026, DRUM Magazine covers will be plastered along routes through Lagos, sharing the walls with church banners, phone adverts, Post No Bill warnings and campaign faces, competing for attention as DRUM once did at the newsstand. 

In Lagos, the poster has always been political: a tool of campaign and protest, regulated, contested and pasted over by the next one. DRUM Cover Stories enters that field with a different proposition, inviting everyday people to consider what has changed, and what has not, and reassess the histories and ideas these images carry. 

Join us as we activate the DRUM archive through a series of events and showcases, opening up new readings of the region’s histories. Find out more about MOWAA's Lagos Art Season programme and events HERE.

This project is presented in partnership with DRUM Archive. The accompanying public talks series is supported by the Ford Foundation.

• Fashion and women: cover girls, style pages and the women Drum seldom named 
• Art and music: the creative scenes of the independence era 
• Sport: football, boxing and the heroes of the terraces 
• Politics and nationhood: independence, the road to civil war and the question of peace 
• City life: crime, prophecy, romance and the everyday drama of Lagos 

In early 2026, we announced the arrival of the DRUM Magazine West African Archives to MOWAA, in partnership with the DRUM Archive, and with the support of Ford Foundation. 

Comprising over 1,000 editions from Nigeria and Ghana and spanning nearly three decades, the archive will be the focus of a multi-strand programme of research, public engagements and exhibitions at MOWAA. 

DRUM Magazine was a defining publication of its time, documenting the social, political and cultural life of postcolonial Africa through bold journalism and photography, shaping a generation of writers, artists and readers across the continent, with its impact still resonant today.

MOWAA’S work with the DRUM archive features multiple strands includes cataloguing, interrogating and activating these landmark editions, a research fellowship opening up new avenues for understanding their cultural and historical significance, and a flagship curatorial project titled Cover Stories.