5 - The Work of Repetition in Nigerian Epistolary Pamphlets

Summary

‘Novels and English Literature … haunt my brain.’

(Oguanobi n.dat.: n.pag.)

In 1964, an Onitsha author using the pseudonym ‘Ralph O. Ability’ published a pamphlet entitled A New Guide to Good English and Correct Letter-Writing that went into circulation in eastern Nigeria alongside numerous similar letter-writing guides by local authors, feeding the prodigious local demand for affordable self-help literature. From its title page onwards, however, this ‘entirely new and up to date handy compilation of good English and correct letters on current topics of current interest’ reproduced extensive portions verbatim from three nineteenth-century publications: The New Universal Letter-Writer, or New Art of Polite Correspondence, an influential, popular volume by the Rev. Thomas Cooke first published in England in 1788 and republished with additions by David Hogan in Philadelphia throughout the first half of the 1800s; the bestselling Classical English Letter-Writer by Elizabeth Frank, published in Britain in 1814 and America in 1816, with numerous revised editions in subsequent decades; and The American Letter-Writer: A Complete Guide to Correspondence on All Subjects of Every-day Life, a popular volume published by George Brumder in Milwaukee in 1888. Large sections of Pitman's Office Desk-Book, an office manual first published in 1906 and revised and reissued throughout the remainder of the century, were also included verbatim at the end of the pamphlet.

A long nineteenth century of English epistolary manuals was condensed into this pamphlet, rendering it anything but ‘entirely new’ or ‘current’. In a letter of condolence offered as a model to readers, for example, Ralph O. Ability writes, ‘Dear Mr Okeke, I hardly like to intrude upon you in your great sorrow, but I cannot resist telling you how much my husband and I sympathised with you’ (1964: 93). ‘Dear Friend,’ opens the same letter in the 1888 edition of George Brumder's The American Letter-Writer: A Guide to Correspondence: ‘I hardly like to intrude upon your great sorrow, but I cannot resist telling you how much my husband and myself sympathize with you’ (77). Death and empathy, this duplication shows, are universal and repeatable across different social times and spaces. In another rather more disruptive and revealing duplication, a Nigerian schoolgirl informs her boyfriend that she cannot consider his marriage proposal until another time because ‘My worthy guardian, Mr. Ralphsco is now at this seat near Ofenwafo’ (54).