“Street Talk”: Pamphlet Literature of the Nigerian Marketplace

Exhibition Opening Event: The opening reception is on Thurs., March 27, at 4:30 in the Hanke Gallery in Sterling Memorial Library. Free and open to the public.

Onitsha Market Literature—named after a city east of the Niger River—emerged in the early 1950s. The popular pamphlet style soon spread to other centers throughout the then British colony of Nigeria. These ephemeral publications circulated widely throughout the busy marketplace, and writers intended them to be both educating and entertaining for the common people.

The pamphlets in this exhibition contain the voices of an emerging nation as it welcomed independence from colonial rule, inspired by pan-African nationalism as it forged a new identity, but was confronted with years of civil war. The topics are wide-ranging: indigenous Nigerian folktales, political commentaries, academic treatments, everyday advice, and new literary experiments.

Onitsha Market Literature provides a portrait—in text and image—of a dynamic period in Nigeria’s history.

Curator: Thobile Ndimande, PhD Student, Department of English