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the complete review - non-fiction

An African Popular Literature

by
Emmanuel Obiechina

general information | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : decent introduction to and survey of Onitsha pamphlet literature

See our review for fuller assessment.

The complete review's Review:

       The Nigerian city of Onitsha reputedly had the largest and most vibrant market in Africa; it still remains known, primarily, for its market. In the very commercial culture that developed there there also arose a literary culture, as African (and especially Igbo) writers began to write for a local audience, tailoring their works to a society where literacy was only beginning to become widespread and where there was still relatively little wealth. Short pamphlets -- cheap, accessible -- became the predominant form, though the content varied, from entertainments to advice-books to dramas. Between the end of World War II and the Biafran crisis, Onitsha was the center of this thriving literary pamphlet culture. (Popular elsewhere in Africa too, Onitsha is still considered the undisputed center of this activity.)
       Few authors rose from the ranks of pamphlet-littérateurs to authors recognized beyond this genre (Cyprian Ekwensi being the notable exception), but the pamphlets enjoyed enormous popularity and certainly influenced several generations of authors. Emmanuel Obiechina's study is a fine introduction to the pamphlet literature, exploring "its main themes and the major conditioning influences". He considers the conditions that led to the pamphlet literature, as well as the works themselves -- including the influences, subject-matter, themes, and use of language. His commentary is occasionally plodding, but he covers a lot of material, presenting it clearly and efficiently, and neatly arranged.
       "The Onitsha Market literature is concerned with the business of living", Obiechina writes. In a fast-changing society, the pamphlets offered guidance and instruction -- presented in a form that itself was new and representative of much of the change (as there had been little written literature in Africa until that time, and certainly none that reached such large audiences). Obiechina compares this period to Elizabethan and early eighteenth-century England, times of rapid change and societal upheaval where the pamphlet form was also very popular.
       The Onitsha Market literature is rarely high art. Many of the pamphlets read like tracts, Obiechina suggests, "mainly because the times need tracts". Authors were concerned more with instruction and setting examples than producing works that were simply literary. They did, however, also seek to entertain.
       Love and then especially the question of marriage (for love, or as arranged by the family) were major issues that were considered in many of the pamphlets. Obiechina believes that the "concept of romantic love" was new to Africa, introduced by Western influences, and that it is the contrast of this with traditional African attitudes towards love, sex, and marriage that caused many of the tensions between generations and cultures in modernizing Africa -- and that this is reflected in the pamphlet literature. The most important source for this new concept of romantic love was, he writes, "the study of English literature in West African schools and universities." Literature shaped the concept: Shakespeare, especially, but also others. Even Marie Corelli (!) and Bertha Clay are deemed highly influential. Transplanted, in the market literature, to an African setting and often finding itself in conflict with traditional expectations and customs, this often led to unusual results -- and also part of the charm of these small tales and tracts.
       Obiechina also considers stylistic influences. Shakespeare is a major one, as he is one of the few authors that practically all the pamphlet-writers were exposed to -- and because his style is so memorable and impressive-sounding. Obiechina also points out that many writers liked to use particularly highfalutin language -- "bombast" -- while others also satirized the use of such language. Bombastic or not, almost all the authors are very liberal in their handling of language -- but, as Obiechina remarks, this too is part of the charm of the works:

Their works also owe their quality of freshness and sparkle to their authors' audacious handling and mishandling of English idiom.

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Links:

• Onitsha Market Literature: From the Bookstalls of a Nigerian Market - at the University of Kansas
• Indiana University Library collection

• Life Turns Man Up and Down, edited by Kurt Thometz
• Ogali Ogali's Veronica My Daughter and Other Onitsha Plays and Stories, including:
  • Adelabu
  • Caroline the One-Guinea Girl
  • Eddy the Coal-City Boy
  • The Ghost of Patrice Lumumba
  • History of Item: Past and Present
  • Long Long Ago
  • Mr. Rabbit is Dead
  • No Heaven for the Priest
  • Okeke the Magician
  • Patrice Lumumba
  • Smile Awhile
  • Thirty Years for the Director
  • Veronica My Daughter
• Index of books relating to Africa

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About the Author:

       Emmanuel Obiechina was lecturer at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

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