Newsprint Literature and Local Literary Creativity in West Africa, 1900s 1960s by Stephanie Newell;

Author:Stephanie Newell;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Published: 2023-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

6. English Romantic Discourse: Women vs Men

I regret to inform you that I treated [your letter] like a letter from a Jackass … If I dear get your letter again, I will drag your name into mud and you will be left in the state of higgledy-piggledy … So paddle your own canoe.

(Okeke 1964: 36–7)

Besides letter-writing manuals, many other epistolary genres were produced in Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s. Pamphleteers attracted their readership by promising to publish letters from members of their own communities, issuing invitations to readers to contribute to the contents of future pamphlets. ‘Whenever you have any family problems or any other problem concerning life, write to us for solution’, wrote J. O. Nnadozie: ‘We shall give you the best advice free of charge. We have been helping so many Readers with advice’ (c.1962: 21). Many how-to pamphlets were composed entirely of readers’ letters, accompanied by commentaries and advice from authors, realising Stuart-Young’s conjecture from the early 1930s that Nigerian newsprint could easily be dominated by epistolary material (Comet 30 December 1933: 9). Meanwhile, as the second part of this chapter will discuss, romantic novelists used letters as a plot device to develop love stories – or tales of seduction and betrayal – in fictional time.

Whatever their genre, and in a similar manner to Thomas’s letters from Sẹgilọla, letters in Onitsha pamphlets were presented both as deeply personal and morally generalisable, as simultaneously real and a part of a fictional world conveying emotional interiority and communicating lessons to readers. Appearing to be from real people living at real addresses, readers’ letters poured into the offices of Onitsha publishers from all over Nigeria and beyond, flowing back out into the public sphere in the form of printed texts in which they were repackaged as moral dilemmas or published in letter-writing manuals containing templates to be emulated. Most correspondents have Igbo or eastern Nigerian names. Even if only a fraction of these letters were from real people, they reveal the dispersal of pamphlets – and eastern Nigerians – throughout Nigeria and neighbouring countries.1

Unlike Sẹgilọla’s correspondence in Akede Eko, which Thomas carefully calibrated with the temporality of his newspaper, this chapter will show how, both in self-help pamphlets and fictional romances, letters frequently occupy an impossible time zone. Whether in romantic novels or how-to pamphlets about love and marriage, pamphleteers’ efforts to achieve newspaper-like currency through supposedly authentic letters often had the reverse effect, stymying time, inhibiting naturalism, raising questions about when and how these supposedly ‘real’ letters could have been produced and, in the process, revealing a great deal about the role played by English literacy in local writers’ assertions of their status as an educated class.

Again and again in Nigerian pamphlets, letters obstruct rather than facilitate narrative flows. While newspaper correspondence was inextricable from the world it described, contributing to a public sphere where current opinion was shaped and serialised in daily or weekly instalments, the removal of letters into singular, one-off, bound pamphlets entailed a loss of currency.

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