In the early 1950s, as Nigeria approached independence from Great Britain, a vibrant literary culture developed in the vast and lively market of Onitsha, a city on the eastern bank of the Niger River.
Presses located near the marketplace produced a continual stream of pamphlets intended to educate and entertain. The slender volumes covered a broad range of topics, including indigenous Nigerian folktales, scholarly tracts, everyday advice, political commentaries, and literary experiments. They circulated widely through the Onitsha market and the pamphlet style spread to market centers across Nigeria, which gained independence in 1960 after nearly a century under British colonial rule.
“Street Talk: Pamphlet Literature of the Nigerian Marketplace,” an exhibit on view in the Hanke Exhibition Gallery in Sterling Memorial Library through Sept. 14, examines the cultural impact these publications had on a dynamic period in Nigerian history. It draws on Yale Library’s collection of Onitsha market literature, the largest such assemblage in the United States.
“Onitsha market literature provides a portrait of a dynamic period in Nigeria’s history,” said Thobile Ndimande, a Ph.D. student in Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “The pamphlets contain the voices of an emerging post-colonial nation as it welcomed independence, endured three years of civil war, and forged a new identity inspired by pan-Africanist nationalism.”
The early-20th-century mask, called “Queen of Women” (“Eze Nwanyi”), serves as the exhibit’s centerpiece.
Greeting visitors as they enter the exhibit space at the back of the library’s nave is an elaborately carved wooden mask peering at them from one of the gallery’s wall cases. The early-20th-century mask, called “Queen of Women” (“Eze Nwanyi”), is from the Igbo people of eastern Nigeria, where Onitsha is located. On loan from the Yale University Art Gallery, the mask serves as the exhibit’s centerpiece, highlighting the prominent role of women and female spirits in the economic, social, and spiritual interactions of the marketplace, said Ndimande, who is in Yale’s Department of English.
“Many of the traders who worked in the market were women — they formed the economic backbone of the country — but they aren’t represented among the authors of the pamphlets themselves, which were written by men,” she said. “While there is a preoccupation with imaginative and literary figurations of women within the market literature, the contributions of women in the production of the pamphlets are unnamed or misplaced.”
The exhibit explores the illustration styles of Onitsha market literature.
Pamphlets displayed with the “Queen of Women” articulate the tensions ordinary Nigerians were feeling as they faced changes posed by independence and offer advice on quotidian matters, such as writing letters and spending money, according to the exhibit text. One 1966 pamphlet, titled “Beware and Bewise,” features a litany of warnings — such as “beware of your pride, it leads to destruction” — demonstrating how market literature often sought to guide readers through their day-to-day lives.
The exhibit explores how market literature, which could be easily printed and was accessible to ordinary Nigerians, pushed back against the colonial-era belief that knowledge production and dissemination was the domain of universities and other institutions tied to Africa’s legacy of colonialism.
“The market literature demonstrates its authors’ expertise on all sorts of subjects,” Ndimande said. “Taken together, it forms a wide-ranging corpus of knowledge of the Nigerian people and their young nation’s ideas about politics, history, and culture.”
Demonstrating the wide range of scholarly subjects studied by these authors, pamphlets on display include “Theories of Dance in Nigeria: An introduction” by Ossie Onuora Enekwe and “The Voting Behaviour and Attitudes of Eastern Nigerians” by Eme O. Awa.
Nigerian women engage in a traditional dance in this postcard from the Yale Library’s African Postcard Collection.
The pamphleteers also drew inspiration from pan-Africanist nationalism, a movement that encourages solidarity among indigenous peoples and diasporas of African ancestry and became widely popular at the end of the colonial period in the mid-20th century. Examples in the exhibit include fictionalized dramas inspired by African leaders like Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana to independence in 1957 and championed African unity, and Patrice Lumumba, the independence leader who was the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and was assassinated in January 1961.
The exhibit also considers the role of language in market literature, particularly a debate in the 1970s concerning whether the English language can carry African stories in the post-colonial world, or if those stories can only be properly articulated through African languages.
Pamphlet literature, Ndimande said, offers a response to this question: Although written in English, the pamphlets deliver narratives with a uniquely Nigerian aesthetic.
Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, whose 1958 novel “Things Fall Apart” is a considered a classic of African literature, was a proponent of the belief that African stories can be appropriately expressed through English. The new exhibit includes a first edition copy of “Things Fall Apart,” alongside a copy of his 1962 short story collection, “The Sacrificial Egg and Other Stories,” which Achebe chose to publish in the Onitsha pamphlet style.
“I think Achebe’s return to the pamphlet style four years after publishing his novel was an ode to the importance and relevance of the market literature, especially the kind of impact that it made in the local context in terms of form and literary aesthetics,” Ndimande said. “Instead of relying on international publishing houses, he opted to publish it as market literature because, first and foremost, he wished to have a Nigerian readership.”
