How Oriire is made.

Oriire is a non-profit digital heritage organisation dedicated to publishing, preserving and interpreting African mythology, folklore and cultural memory across the continent and its diasporas.

Our editorial focus centres on rigorous, well-researched and contextual analysis of cultural narratives, belief systems, practices and worldviews across Africa's communities, using myth as a lens for understanding African and diasporic histories, identities and lived realities.

Every donation and membership goes directly toward paying contributors, funding field research and keeping Oriire free.

Contributors come to us through commissions and open submissions, and every accepted piece is paid. Submissions go through two stages of editorial review, the first for fit and originality, the second for fact-checking, sourcing and cultural context.

We verify by tracing claims to named sources. Where the story is oral, we attribute to the community or tradition it belongs to, and where possible to the elders and practitioners who carry it. Oral traditions are by their nature partly held in memory and transmitted across generations, and we treat that as a feature of the material.

When two communities tell a story differently, we publish both versions and credit each, rather than collapsing them into a single telling.

We do not publish AI-generated content, and submissions that use AI assistance must disclose it on the submission form.

Oriire is organised around three editorial pillars that shape what we publish.

Founder. Sesi Morgan.

Team. Shalom Kasim (Editor), Ibukunoluwa Johnson (Community Manager).

Contributors. Oriire is built on the work of writers, researchers, and oral history collectors whose names appear on individual pieces.

Podcast. Hosted by Sesi Morgan with co-host Haleemah Atobiloye.

Design and engineering. Sesi Morgan, with Mowa.

We use Satoshi across the site, for display headlines, section titles, body text and the interface, set in Medium with tightened letter-spacing for headings. The article reading column is set in Source Serif 4 at 19px, which also carries our editorial accents such as drop caps, pull quotes and the italic letterform behind the codex glyph fallback.

Our palette is mostly tonal, with neutral greys and warm whites alongside three pillar colours. Myth is a soft terracotta (#F2D6CB), Tradition a soft blue (#C8D4E6), and Memory a muted green (#CFDDD0).

The site is built on Next.js with a Supabase data layer, deployed on Cloudflare Workers via the OpenNext adapter.

Oriire's first version was on Wix. We rebuilt on Webflow in 2022, then migrated to the current Next.js stack in 2026 when Webflow had become expensive for the traffic we were getting and slow as Oriire grew. Mowa's case study covers what changed and why.

Oriire covers African mythology, folklore, tradition and memory from the continent and its diasporas. Early content leans Nigerian because the founder and most current contributors are Nigerian, and the editorial direction widens as the contributor base grows. If your community has a story that should be on Oriire and isn't here yet, the submissions page is open.