4 - Onitsha Pamphlets: Youth Literature for the Modern World

Summary

This is an African booklet, written by an African, for Africans and other interested readers.

(Stephen 1964: n.pag.)

‘Onitsha market literature’ has been described by literary critics as an extraordinary phenomenon: it started in the early 1950s with the sporadic publication of locally authored romances and how-to pamphlets in the eastern Nigerian market town of Onitsha, commissioned by local printers who wished to generate income and keep their staff busy in the quiet months when the rush for school textbooks subsided after the start of the academic year (Dodson 1974). With the publication in 1956 of Ogali A. Ogali's runaway bestseller, Veronica My Daughter: A Drama, which sold an estimated 80,0000 copies in its first year, these generative spores mushroomed into a full-scale local publishing industry in Onitsha and surrounding cities (Dodson 1973: 174). Printers and publishers – who were often also authors and booksellers – started to produce pamphlets by the hundreds, largely in English, in genres ranging from adventure stories to ‘how-to’ books, popular romances, dramas, epistolary manuals, travel narratives, poetry collections, fictional autobiographies and commentaries on current affairs.

Known locally as ‘little books’ and ‘small books’, Onitsha market literature contained ‘a distinctive, African colour’ and was filled with ‘the familiar people we see around us’, providing advice about life alongside ‘funs and amusements to one and thousands of Nigerians’ (Madu, n.dat.: n.pag.; ‘Speedy Eric’ 1964, n.pag.; Ogu 1960: n.pag.). For the first time in British West Africa, large-scale local book publishing broke its tethers to colonial and missionary institutions and independent authors did not have to take financial responsibility for printing and marketing their books.

This chapter offers a bridge between the colonial-era newspapers discussed in previous chapters and Independence-era pamphlets produced on local presses in Nigeria. Turning towards new genres, a later historical period, and a noticable change in the social class of authors, the chapter nevertheless highlights continuities across these literatures as examples of English-language newsprint creativity. Primary among these is the way pamphleteers turned to newspapers for sources of information and instruction as well as literary models. Responding rapidly to news stories, Nigerian pamphleteers competed to be the first to dramatise momentous political events such as the assassination of Congolese prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, in January 1961, or the imprisonment of Obafemi Awolowo for treason in 1963 (see Chapter 8).