Student-curated exhibition of Nigerian pamphlet literature celebrates an emerging nation

“Street Talk: Pamphlet Literature of the Nigerian Marketplace” is on view in the Hanke Exhibition Gallery in Sterling Memorial Library through Sept. 14.

During the early 1950s and 1960s, a period of post-colonial transformation, these popular booklets circulated among people in the marketplace of the city of Onitsha and eventually in markets throughout Nigeria. The wide-ranging topics include political commentaries, new literary experiments, indigenous Nigerian folktales, academic treatises, and everyday advice—presented in authentic, accessible language to educate and entertain local readers.

The pamphlets on display are from Yale Library’s collection of Onitsha Market Literature, the largest such collection in the United States. John Moore D. Crossey, Yale’s first and longest-serving Africana librarian and curator, acquired the collection’s first objects in the 1980s.

The exhibition also features books (by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe and by Ama Ata Aidoo, the first female African dramatist) from Sterling and Beinecke libraries, period postcards from Manuscripts and Archives, a “Queen of Women” mask from Yale University Art Gallery, and miniature masks (“maa go”) from a private collection.

The exhibition was curated by Thobile Ndimande, PhD student in the Department of English.

Read more in the article by Mike Cummings in Yale News.

—Deborah Cannarella