From the Brink of Oblivion: The Anxious Masculinism of Nigerian Market Literatures

Author(s): Stephanie Newell

Source: Research in African Literatures , Autumn, 1996, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Autumn, 1996),
pp. 50-67
Published by: Indiana University Press

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 From the Brink of
Oblivion: The Anxious
Masculinism of Nigerian
Market Literatures

Stephanie Newell

The earliest mass-produced popular literature in Nigeria

has been labelled, rather inaccurately, "Onitsha market literature." Few detailed
analyses have been undertaken of the pamphlets, which are generally considered
to be transitional, even passe, produced inside a bubble of inexplicable creativity
that burst abruptly with the outbreak of the Biafran War in 1967 (see Obiechina,
An African Popular Literature).1 Nigerian market literature is fraught with a gen-
der ideology, however, that persists in contemporary popular literatures. There is
too much material of historical interest and contemporary relevance to pass it by.
In particular, it foreshadows, sometimes even echoes, the gender preoccupations
of many contemporary popular literatures which are written, printed and distrib-
uted sub-nationally in Nigeria. Influenced by local, orally narrated folk traditions
as well as by mission readers, Indian texts and the figureheads of English litera-
ture, the pamphlets were the sites where contradictory notions of masculine power
jostled for dominance, adapting to the altered social relations and new female
identities accompanying decolonization and urbanization in Nigeria. A retrieval
and re-reading of the much-neglected Nigerian pamphlets will therefore allow us
to comment on the contradictory and tension-ridden nature of urban masculine
identities at a time when gender roles were in the process of being actively
re-negotiated.
An internally complex masculine ideology can be located in Nigerian popu-
lar literatures written by men since the early 1960s. The term "masculinism" will
be used for that strand of masculinity where the artist anxiously re-invents and
re-presents women to a male addressee, adapting old gender models to maintain
male control of changing social and cultural formations. Where masculinity is the
ideology supporting male social and political power, masculinism is a more obses-
sional male mind-set, designating one particular set of representations within the
gender ideology. It is not necessarily conspiratorial and need not be regarded as a
consciously thought-out strategy by men to ensnare women in negative gender
roles. Instead, it is more of an attitude, a conservative and entrenched way of
thinking about gender relations.
This model of masculinity will be utilized in conjunction with Karin Barber's
pivotal theoretical framework, formulated in her article "Popular Arts in Africa"
(1987). Barber explores the problem of how to interpret and situate African
popular art forms: her dynamic model endows popular arts with the collective
self-confidence and internal fluidity that characterizes an emergent class.

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 Stephanie Newell 51

Responding to urbanization, situated in the zone between official art forms,

formulaic and yet governed by no aesthetic conventions, the popular arts in Africa
are like rapid response forces reacting to dislocations in social relations (13).
Expressing states of social transition, popular texts are, in themselves, perpetually
transitive.
Barber's framework implies that an apparent lack of cohesion-a structural
fragmentation or open-ended conclusion-is a sign of the unofficial discourse's
self-confidence and assertiveness. Writers' demonstrative and comic "aesthetic of
immediate impact" expresses an unworried attitude to the structural conventions
of official art ("Popular Arts" 43). Repetitions and overemphases would, in this
model, be viewed not as signs of ideological instability, but, like the heteroge-
neous music-hall performances of nineteenth-century England, as expressing a
confidence in the shared humor, experiences, and expectations of the audience,
trusting the audience to make links with an invisible totality (46-48).
Not everything "unofficial" is unhierarchical, however, cut free from the
ideological formations that are invoked to legitimize social power and privilege.
Nigerian popular literatures contrast with the freedom of expression suggested by
Barber's model of the unofficial arts: the instability of these texts can be viewed
differently, as indicating a more ambivalent attitude. Barber makes a similar point
in an earlier, less well-known article, "Radical Conservatism in Yoruba Popular
Plays" (1986). In this contextual study, she analyzes the history, emergence, and
organizational structure of Yoruba travelling theaters, as well as the influence of
their urban, young, male audiences upon the thematic content of productions.
Observing an intensification of misogynistic attitudes in recent performances,
Barber specifies the social and economic changes giving rise to these attitudinal
shifts. Misogyny arises, she argues, in response to the breakdown of the separate
gender spheres that characterized the precolonial division of labor. With the
arrival of women as competitors for "same sphere" jobs, particularly in the infor-
mal sector from which theater companies draw their audiences, productions
express the "shrill cry of protest from the class of men who lose most by women's
changing opportunities: an attempt not so much to preserve a valued traditional
order as to put the brakes on social change at all costs" ("Radical Conservatism"
23).
Theaters "reveal in heightened and concentrated form the anxieties, preoccu-
pations and convictions that underpin ordinary people's daily experience"
("Radical Conservatism" 6). Similarly, in every scene of the fragmented, action-
packed pamphlets, life passions peak and conventional language breaks down
under stress from the effort to redefine and express masculine and feminine sub-
jectivities. In a single paragraph of a pamphlet written in 1956, George C.
Obodoechi writes, "The right hand cannot wash itself clean without the left and
neither can the reverse. Without the mind, the arrow cannot rightly dirent [!] its
course and the wind cannot direct nothingness if there is no arrow to operate on"
(3).2 The direct communication of meaning becomes unstable as English proverbs
are mis-taken from the master language, filtered through the authorial conscious-
ness, mixed with metaphors from the author's local language or merged into
lists of aphorisms; proverbs are then re-presented in syncretic mutations that
undermine the original proverbs and force them to carry the weight of their altered
cultural context.

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52 Research in African Literatures

Moments of ideological stillness can be found in popular literatures. If t

constitution of masculinity in each culture is fluid, constantly arbitrating the shi
in socio-economic relations, there are positions within it that are more fixed, eve
fixated. Such a fixation can be located in romances written by men between 1
and the late 1960s. In the bulk of this literature, an anxious "hegemonic ma
culinity"3 can be seen constantly attempting to encircle sexually self-determin
female bodies, repeatedly punishing those who move away from the bounde
ideal femininities-such as the "good wife"-which are actively promoted in t
literature. The public face of manhood in male-authored literature is, nevertheles
not necessarily confident and assertive: its masculinist expression, which perm
ates the texts, is anxious, threatened by the women in society who cannot
reined in, who escape the gender ideology's control to declare their own set
self-created, more egalitarian goals.
Without denying cultural dynamism, or the "flexibility and elusiveness" t
Barber posits as the "potential strength" of popular art forms ("Popular Arts"
to locate a coherent literary masculinism is to draw attention to the existence
persistence of a steady masculine power in writing. In Nigerian popular literatur
it operates through clusters of interlinked representations of women that for
paper chain around ordinary women's lives, enclosing them in negative sexu
stereotypes that contemporary authors inherit, mediate and re-write in their ow
literatures. A crucial feature of this gender discourse in Nigerian popular cultu
is the strength of its voice in naming and defining femininities. Viewed fro
gender perspective, the literatures lose their internal heterogeneity and ga
loose ideological structure.
Between the late 1940s and late 1960s, the period of intense national
activism in Africa, a new class of men emerged in Nigeria. Inspired to write, t
picked up pens for the first time and started to interpret their world active
creating new popular forms and formulas to contain their expressions. New
literate, confident, and as common as his neighbor, each man who decided to wri
found an urban reading public keen to accept his authority by absorbing hi
personal philosophy, advice, and interpretations. The multitude of pamphle
produced by this emergent class form a network of opinions and warnings, retu
ing repeatedly to the subject of deviant femininities.
Pamphlets were first produced and circulated in urban Nigeria in the 20 year
immediately before Independence. Proliferating in Onitsha but written and p
duced in cities throughout the south and east, pamphlets both expressed and w
expressions of a period of immense social and economic change. This was als
period of rapid psychological expansion as Nigerians readjusted their region
affiliations to fill out the national boundaries being promoted by vociferou
politicians.
Nigerian market literature can be re-read for signs of an insecure masculinity
in the process of having its body re-built and launched as the cultural ideal. Fluid,
dynamic gender identities are being created and fixed by the authors, who adopt
pen-names such as Strong Man of the Pen, Moneyhard, Experienced Demon,
Speedy Eric, and Master of Life. Less urbanized masculinities are discarded as an
embarrassing residue, re-incorporated in the texts in the form of loud-mouthed
rural "illitrates," such as Mr Okonkwo and Chief Jombo, who speak nothing but

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 Stephanie Newell 53

pidgin (see Iguh, Agnes in the Game of True Love and Ogali, Veronica
My Daughter).4
Richard Priebe has argued, in his study of Ghanaian popular novelettes, that
there is a direct "text-context" relationship linking the settings and characters of
locally published novels to their political environments: popular literature
"reflects the current values of a society" (422), and when "the common
people ... look to literature they try to find resolution for the complexities of life"
(414). A set of intertextual, authorial, and ideological relations can also be located,
complicating this view of popular literature and making texts more mediated than
Priebe's persuasive model. In spite of pamphlet writers' attempts in forewords and
prefaces to rein-in their texts, re-claiming authority and imposing singular moral
meanings, Nigerian popular literature does not echo an author's moral intentions,
for nothing is passed unmediated to the reader. Nor does market literature simply
mirror the collective unconscious of society at large in a sociological or psycho-
logical sense. Instead, individual pamphlets act as cultural brokers, written by a
new class of men seeking self-empowerment and opportunities in a transformed
social field (see Barber, "Popular Arts"). Interrupting inherited representations of
gender, they shift, challenge, or re-affirm the parameters of readers' social identi-
ties, changing the ideological lenses through which readers view the world and
actively interpreting the fluid, expanding urban marketplace by inserting
re-worked roles and expectations into the minds of urban populations.
Focusing on marriage and love, the pamphlets share a sort of editorial
overview stemming from authors' agreements upon representations of femininity,
in conformity with an emergent urban masculine ideology. Similar representations
of socially destructive women reverberate through the texts, as narrators cluster
anxiously around prostitutes, money-grabbing beauties, promiscuous wives, and
"husbandless" Highlife-dancers. By stereotyping femininity, narrators attempt to
fix it, warn against it, and disarm it in a rapidly urbanizing context. As the newly
literate class of men start writing, it thus becomes possible to glimpse the fragility
of the emergent masculinity governing Nigerian gender relations. It is expressed
in these texts as a tense, often paranoid, attempt to make a complex world trans-
parent, priming it for (over-)interpretation. Fumbling for commonality, the
authors find themselves in a country that is becoming an invisible, "imagined
community" at a dizzying rate (see Anderson, Imagined Communities 33-44), and
while market literature is a syncretic discourse, it manifests a discordant rather
than a harmonious syncretism.
This is a literature of suspicion about what women's external appearances
conceal, because in moder Nigerian society, as pamphlets repeat, "all that glit-
ters is not gold" (Ogali, Caroline the One Guinea Girl n.pag.). The female body
is inscribed with masculinity's efforts to adapt and regain control: revelations of
women's sexual guilt are inserted into the unstable, slippery world. In Beware of
Harlots and Many Friends, J. O. Nnadozie (1963?) includes letters from men
accusing wives and friends of poisoning them, disguising their plans with coun-
terfeit gestures of love (12). Reaching the height of helpless paranoia, he
advocates complete surveillance as the sole solution: men should watch their
wives constantly, "1. To see that they are not wandering as harlots. 2. To save and
free their lives from bad diseases" (28); similarly, in Beware of Women (1960),

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54 Research in African Literatures

N. O. Njoku's paranoid masculinism extends to suspicions that "your enemy w

has been finding a way with which to kill you, gets you through her" (5).
Authors invest immense levels of intellectual energy in constructing fictiona
case studies of different types of women, working towards an agreed repertoire
ideal and erring femininities. In the preface to Beware of Dangerous Lad
(1965), the eloquent and ardent masculinist Olusola Asani explains such project
The notion of this booklet is to reveal the secrecy and the tricks of our
young girls of nowadays ... [because] it is not possible for a young man
whether married or unmarried to live happily without at first knowing
how to get rid of our modem mendacious and honey tongued girls who
are the squeezers of the scanty sum usually paid to my dear gentle-men
as their monthly income. (1)
If women's sexual intentions can be discovered and represented, it seems, th
masculine power structures ruptured by decolonization and urbanization will
restored.
The widespread preoccupation with the difference between women's beaut
fully painted exteriors and their lethal schemes is evidence of male authors' se
of uncontrol and social powerlessness. Their suspicions might be comprehend
as a psycho-literary response to the process of urban dislocation occurring
men's lives throughout southern Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s. Cyril Aririg
gives voice to the new urban mentality in the preface to The Work of Love (19
"There is no doubt," he writes, "that readers today have an insatiable curios
about other people's private lives and things around us" (n.pag.). His narrative
an attempt to penetrate those unknown city lives and make sense of them. Fo
young man in the city, publicly performed social duties were no longer necess
and a new set of urban moral codes had to be interiorized; neighbors w
frequently unrecognizable, and were literally incomprehensible if from differ
linguistic groups; and, away from home, the pressure of responsibilities to th
extended family altered, as indicated by the plethora of village unions in tow
actively reinforcing the social contract.
Emmanuel Obiechina distinguishes pamphlet writers from "sophisticated"
"intellectual" writing on the grounds of the former's superficiality. He sugge
repeatedly that the pamphlet authors encourage "individualism without soci
responsibility," concerning themselves "with surface appearances while the int
lectual authors look for underlying causes and explanations" (An African Popu
Literature 118). Market literature's preoccupation with surfaces, however, dem
strates its paranoid search for "underlying causes and explanations" beneath th
deceptive surfaces. Expressing the complex tensions accompanying decoloniz
tion and urbanization, the majority of pamphlets do not embrace change in t
unambiguous, enthusiastic fashion suggested by so many commentators.
Arising from the layers of alienation and cultural confusion is the suspici
that all is not as it seems in the city; and pamphlet authors generally insist o
women's status as a source of the crisis of recognition. Warning single and new
married men of women's money-grabbing intentions, Obodoechi writes, in
Ideal Wife to Marry (1956): "Beware of extremely exquisite and paragon resem
bling figures of attraction devoid of senses and culture because they do not alway
prove good housewives" (2). Deeply suspicious like the others in the How

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 Stephanie Newell 55

genre, Obodoechi insists repeatedly that women's outward beauty conceals their
inner moral decay. The prevailing view is that, in order to ascertain the truth,
inversions are necessary, for "when they say that they love you it means that they
hate you" (Asani 3).
Female infidelity is the key theme of this literature: recurring across pam-
phlets, the stereotypical unfaithful woman is trailed by condemnations. In his
stream of accusations, What Women are Thinking About Men: No.l Bomb to
Women, J. O. Nnadoze (1971) continues the masculine ideology's urgent project
to penetrate and map the feminine mind. Ironically, the project is confined to such
a narrow band of (un-)representative feminine types that it can never move into
the complex and ambiguous world of urban women existing beyond its ideologi-
cal enclosure. Ignoring the fact that, against the pamphlet's manifest masculinism,
it is men who deceive women in most texts, he warns men repeatedly to
"Beware," for Nigerian women are money-grabbing, and unable to say, "no Panky
Nyanky" (25). The reality behind women's fluttering eyelashes is that "they only
love your wealth but not you" (Maxwell, Public Opinion on Lovers 6). Perhaps
the superficiality criticized by Obiechina arises from the symptomatic and ideo-
logically mediated, rather than the analytical nature of these accusations, for no
social or economic explanations are proposed for why women should love men's
money so much, or why an increase in female prostitution should occur alongside
the expansion of Nigerian cities.
Very few women writers were published by local printing presses in the
1950s and 1960s. A cursory survey of the British Library's catalogue, Market
Literature from Nigeria: A Checklist (1990), revealed only four: Elizabeth Ema
Brown, Margaret U. Ekpo, Miss A. I. Nwafor, and Esther Kike.5 Other women
writers may have been using pseudonyms or initials instead of full forenames. The
figure of the pamphlet author is pivotal in each text: he interrupts the fluid,
ambiguous world to interpret it for the reader, to fix it and make it mean some-
thing definite; he-presuming it is always he-cautions the reader, teaching the
male addressee techniques to see things as they really are.6 As a consequence of
the invisible, impenetrable behaviors of the new national community, eyesight is
a crucial sense in the pamphlets, and recognition a crucial mental operation.
Writers train readers to see differently, requiring them to find improved, relevant
metaphors for the modernity they witness: "'What a pontiac,' men said whenever
they were chanced to have a camera look at Caro's nicely set breasts through her
nylon blouse" (Ogali, Caroline the One Guinea Girl 1). The male gaze has
become a Westernized "camera look" in Ogali's narrative, and masculine desire is
equated with a glamorous foreign consumer economy.
Recognizing all the signs of the "good-time girl" eases the insecurity seeping
through the expansive, heterogeneous cities. Pamphlet authors' eagerness to
clarify this murky world leads to the elimination of suspense-the suspension of
suspense-in fictional narratives. The introduction to Highbred Maxwell's Our
Modem Ladies Characters Towards Boys (1959) is a plot synopsis, exposing the
reality behind Miss Beauty's deceptive appearance and revealing how, after a life
of prostitution, she "heart brokenly died a miserable lonely and lamentable death"
(n.pag.). The reader is made to occupy a privileged seeing and learning position
in every text. Situated beyond confusion, beyond suspicion, the reader cannot be
deceived in the same way as innocent characters. So honest female villains

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56 Research in African Literatures

obligingly reveal details of each evil plan, never frustrated by circumstances

surprises, remaining correct in every maneuver. Conspiracies are explained
thoroughly by narrators at the start, and repeated throughout by the deceivers,
readers cannot be disconcerted by any plot surviving the early exposure; similarl
subtitles such as "How Stella Became a Widow After Three Years" (Aroye 33
inhibit the free movement of readers' anticipation, frustrating their projection
range of plot possibilities.
In spite of this thematic and ideological coherence, the pamphlets are stru
turally fragmented. Influenced by many sources, they combine sustained dramat
dialogue with short, didactic anecdotes; meanwhile, a continuous moral comm
tary is kept up by an intervening narrator. Few pamphlets are written in a way t
excludes this moral, commentating role. Priebe noticed a similar moral presen
in Ghanaian popular novelettes, in which sexually and morally clean men were
up by authors to function as physical, literal embodiments of an incorrupt, heal
body politic (410-13). In Nigerian pamphlets, the apparent links between such
narrator and oral storytellers are supported in those texts where vocal, prese
audiences are written in as scripted respondents, always agreeing to author
interventions and applauding his moral judgments at the end.
Authors' unanimous refusal to adopt European plot conventions in the dr
mas can be explained not as a mark of literary incompetence, but as an indicat
that fictionality has been marginalized in favor of the didactic, problem-solv
approach to narrative. Suspense would paradoxically re-instate the plot in tex
that aim from the outset to reveal motivations and conspiracies, to advise a
socialize as well as to entertain young men. Market literature is characterized
by the surprised intake of readerly breath, but by sighs of relief, for signifiers
united instantly with concrete signifieds, disallowing the free play of langua
and the multiplication of meanings. Readers are secure in their foreknowledge
dramatic events in the texts: there will be no suspense undermining the project
hiding character intentions, re-introducing suspicion, doubt, and insecurity. S
pamphlets circulate between the world and the reader, the act of writing take
a meaning-making status that would horrify poststructuralists. The written w
is treated by authors as that which reflects final truths, arresting the confusing b
of city faces to identify causes and character types.
Within the texts, love letters circulate the physical space separating youn
men from women. Sent in vast quantities between secondary school student
these letters are an autonomous and syncretic art form, a genre-within-a-gen
simultaneously echoing the language of Shakespeare plays, Hollywood movie
and Bertha Clay novels. Lovers' arguments and proposals of marriage pass to
fro so rapidly that the letter-writing couple sometimes have not had time to phy
ically leave the room before the correspondence commences. These love lett
express youthful, romantic passion without a hint of sexual lust.
Love letters are considered to be permanent contracts, more fixed than t
spoken word. Writing seals the emotional connection: "Have you forgotten
second paragraph of our agreement which reads that none of us should hav
another friend?," asks an indignant lover in J. Abiakam's How to Speak to Gi
and Win Their Love (1966?). Love letters are also a way of communicat
secretly, without parental knowledge. There is a warning attaching to the writ
word, however, and it is this: "what is written is written, and there is no alterati

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 Stephanie Newell 57

The words of a letter are not like the spoken words so beware, you can mistak-
ingly write what can put you into trouble" (Obioha, Our Modem Love Letters 13).
Words disappear into air, but letters are the material realizations of promises,
signed and sealed contracts that signify unbreakable emotional ties.
The belief in the concrete truth of the written word is consistent and unani-
mous, shared between authors, readers, and fictional characters. While reader
response to market literature has been recorded only rarely, Don Dodson cites the
reaction of a cosmetics trader to the counsel offered by his pamphlet: " 'Since I
read Money Hard ... I have learnt to beware of women with stricted measure.
Women are generally after money' " (186). Other readers interviewed by Dodson
voiced a similar interpretive literalism, having copied love letters faithfully and
taken pamphlets' claims to non-fictionality at face value, keenly absorbing the
knowledges they offer.
Market literature tends to exclude omniscient narration. In spite of their belief
in the stability of the word, authors do not "trust the tale" to carry its own moral
lessons, and readers are not trusted to receive the textual messages. Narrators
interrupt their texts to actively interpret and offer counsel, divorcing readers from
an imaginative identification with characters and events, distancing them from the
vibrant and beautiful women of the fictions. Set up as sinful from the start, urban
women smile while seducing their victims. Paradoxically, the surfeit of narratorial
warnings, interventions, and interpretations implies that it is impossible to dis-
cover the motives of real-that is, the un-represented-women. In spite of their
efforts and warnings, the majority of pamphlets enact the impossibility of discov-
ering these women in advance of misfortune. The foreword to Never Trust All
That Love You, by Rufus Okonkwo (1961), claims that the book of advice
"teaches us [about] the life of our modem girls and women. [T]heir characters are
wanting" (n.pag.).7 However, after positing women as society's smiling, secret
enemies, a subsection, "Short Advice for Men about Marriage," can only advise,
"Men-Be Careful" (19).
The "wordy wise" project cannot succeed in fixing up the world, because
pamphlet writers are unable to represent completely the flow of strangers passing
through Nigerian marketplaces. Petrified on the page, fictional men are deceived
again and again by well-disguised women. As Nnadozie says at the end of his con-
spiracy-ridden Beware of Harlots and Many Friends, "the world is going like a
rolling stone" (44) and there is little authors can do except repeat the paranoid
warning, "beware." Contemporary East African popular fiction closely parallels
the "beware-women" bias of Nigerian pamphlets. In a recent study of a Kenyan
popular magazine, Bodil Folke Frederiksen cites Swahili newspaper fiction titles
such as "Don't Trust the Playgirls Who Live in the Cities" and "Love Affairs with
Playgirls Poison for Executives" (149). Similarly, Priebe finds that frequently the
narrators of Ghanaian novelettes depict the enticement, loss of self-control, and
fall of young men into the arms of sexually alluring women (397-400).
West African folktales, orally narrated to immediately present audiences,
often warn against marrying strangers. Yoruba, Igbo, and Ashanti stories tell of
how the Most Beautiful Stranger, or the Complete Gentleman, seduces a girl
whose parents have warned her against strangers and either left her at home, or
sent her to purchase goods in the local market; she follows the Stranger into the
forest beyond the village limits, where he is transformed into a sexually voracious,

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58 Research in African Literatures

maggot-eating monster from whom she has to be rescued before order is resto
Nigerian pamphlets interact with this oral stockpile of characters and situat
which contribute to the inheritance of masculine and feminine roles. The par
attributes of urban pamphlets, where disguises conceal monstrous interio
clearly manifest the influence of such narratives.
If suspicious narratives pre-exist decolonization and urbanization, pamph
cannot be endowed with single city sources. An ever-dynamic folk heritage
retained its relevance by absorbing new currents, adapting recognizable char
and situations to suit social change. "If I would start my story like our great g
fathers," Wasco says in The Chains of Love, "I would first tell you a story of
the tortoise thought he was the wisest man only to remember at last that ther
one who knew one thing that he did not know himself' (Ajokuh 53). The fact
Wasco does not tell his story in an alternative way implies that, subtextual
least, the great-grandfathers' formal folk narrative, with its emphasis on learn
from others, holds a privileged position in the pamphlet. In spite of their ou
ken rejection of non-literate lifestyles, prominent motifs and morals from oral
ratives are absorbed and re-worked. In particular, authors retain the oral arc
emphasis on the terrible consequences of marriage to strangers and the insis
on wifely obedience and fertility.
An immediate difference from oral archives is that the last words of market
texts are far less clear than the morally educative and structured outcomes of
tales. Ambiguous and indeterminate solutions to lifestyle dilemmas are offer
the form of ditties or lists of aphorisms; alternatively, unduly violent punishm
are meted out to the text's erring woman. No neat narrative knots can be ti
characters' lives, and texts regularly offer unjust or confused endings, structu
testifying to their own inability to construct coherent interpretive frames aro
the world.
Nigerian popular literatures are adaptable and open to a range of influe
not everything is reducible to what Berth Lindfors calls "the rigid logic o
chapbook formula" (59). With this fluidity in mind, it is nevertheless possib
recognize folklore characters who enter popular urban texts, undergoing transf
mations in the process. Crucially, the gender of folktale baddies has been
ended and updated by the Nigerian narrators. If the beautiful stranger was o
male monster, "he" has become "she" in the popular culture of postcol
towns. With the easing of family restrictions and responsibilities on young wo
and their movement into urban areas to trade and earn cash, popular literatu
least perceives a threat to masculine power structures. In the realm of repre
tion, externally seductive women are now the monsters, swallowing young
into their corrupt bodies, bleeding the nation's productive resources and ref
to reproduce future citizens.
Rather than echoing a single oral or written source, the structurally cha
literature of the 1950s and 1960s expresses a struggle to locate a language
field of representations that will allow urban Nigerians to recognize and
themselves. The most prominent ideological adjustment process occurs with
adoption of a vocabulary of romantic love; it tends to be smoothly incorpor
into contemporary Nigerian romances, but, in the earlier texts, signifies the r
readjustment to urban relations, influenced by Shakespearean and Hollyw
representations of love. Cries of "Oh Phube!" resound through market litera

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 Stephanie Newell 59

One distressed lover cries, "Oh Phube! When will I look at your Angelic face
again, when will I touch your smooth body and glance at your hairy hands"
(Njoku, How to Write Love Letters 20). At other times, it is almost impossible to
wade through the romantic verbiage, as heroines are suffocated by layer upon
layer of endearments culled from Western romances.
In his "tentative" and "undeveloped" speculations on masculine identity-
formations, R. W. Connell points out that the most tension in the hegemonic mas-
culine ideology clusters around the construction of the ideal woman, termed the
"emphasised femininity" (187). Emphasized femininity is, he writes, promoted in
the mass media "with an insistence and on a scale far beyond that found for any
form of masculinity" (187). If men's representations of female compliance with a
restrictive gender ideology can be termed "emphasised femininity" (183), then the
"good wife" is thoroughly overemphasized in market literature. Texts are infused
with the paranoid conviction that "nowadays husbands do not know what their
wives are doing privately he cannot know how many husbands has she" (Olusola
10). The construction of an emphasized femininity-rendered static for inspec-
tion-is perhaps the key purpose of Nigerian market literature: whether regarded
as overtly masculinist, moderate or progressive, texts are unanimous on the qual-
ities that comprise a good wife. In An Ideal Wife to Marry, Obodoechi merely
repeats the inventory of virtues: "a sense of duty on the part of the intended wife"
is vital, and other perfections to prevent the home from becoming "a squabble cir-
cle" include "plausibility, quality of respect and self-control, helpfulness in diffi-
culty . . . loyalty to her man, obedience to his commands" (4).
Above all, pamphlets repeat, "her office is the kitchen" (Moneyhard 16): if she
can cook, "she becomes your lump of delight, your flower of beauty, your
guardian partner, your heart's treasure, your mind's peace and your blooming
pride" (Obodoechi 13).
Pamphlets are a form of print-knowledge addressed to a young male reader
cast adrift in the expanding Nigerian marketplace, anxious about his role and how
to interpret the mass of unknown faces around him. If he has embraced worldli-
ness, loosened his family ties, and dismissed his parents to the margins of moder-
nity, the advising, cautioning pamphlet he buys steps straight into the parental gap,
adopting the authority "to help those young men" who are looking for wives
(Obodoechi, Preface).8 Counselling, reading the signs, revealing the truths about
women, pamphlets are works of what C.N.O. Moneyhard calls "story advice" for
men (19), assuming an explicitly didactic function and cautioning the young male
reader about women, love, and money. Filled with lively anecdotes that illustrate
serious moral statements, most of the texts declare in their prefaces, if not in
their titles, that they are designed to deliver youths from the trickish ploys of
women. Where parents once selected their children's marriage partners, delving
into family histories and assessing the other's morality, the pamphlets now help
young men to choose suitable wives.
Ironically, a deep ignorance or confusion is often expressed by the text-
parent towards new situations, for many of the authors are as young and naive
about the world as their late-teenage readers. As a result, they often promote ado-
lescent and immature versions of love, sex, morality, and marriage. Perhaps this
further explains the texts' fragmentary structures: both uneasy and uncontrolled,
they are themselves searching for stability and literary guidance. It might also

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60 Research in African Literatures

explain the shocking levels of sexual violence against women which seem to
from a fear of mature women's bodies. Olufela Davies's Born to be a Flirt?
(1962) contains two brutal sexual attacks on prostitutes and a gang rape. The na
rator's intervention at the end to offer the moral of the tale is completely inco
gruous. After such levels of sexual violence against women, Davies appeals to
women to stop being deceitful and urges men not to fall into women's powe
Other pamphlets about prostitutes and "good-time girls" include gang rapes
(Obioha, Beauty Is A Trouble) and the vivid depiction of a "good-time girl" blee
ing to death after an abortion (Speedy Eric, Mabel the Sweet Honey). These scen
can be linked to the pervasive petrification of masculinity about independen
young women who have moved out of men's economic, social, and politi
control, and whose suspected mercenary intentions are hidden in a language
false love.
Different types of the "modem girl" are represented in the pamphlets. Ogali
Ogali, Thomas Iguh, and Okenwah Olisah offer examples of a dynamic, indepen-
dent womanhood to their readers, climbing aboard the vehicle of romantic love to
proclaim a new gender equality. These heroines appear to make their choices with
no support from masculinity's archives of role models. Consciously breaking
away from inherited roles, the moral of Ogali's Veronica My Daughter, explained
in the Preface and repeated throughout, is that "we are no more in the age when
girls are forced to marry contrary to their wishes," in conformity with obstruc-
tionist, "traditional" fathers (n.pag.). Ogali's text, first published by Zik
Enterprizes in 1956, is one of the most popular and irreverent attacks on "tradi-
tional" paternal authority: it is entertaining, shocking, and immensely successful.9
By fixing up the father as a figure of fun, a laughable other, Ogali distinguishes
between types of masculinity, subordinating chiefly power in order to preserve the
increasing authority of his own class of men. Like Thomas Iguh in Agnes in the
Game of True Love (1960) and Rufus Okonkwo in The Game of Love (1964?),
Ogali points to the possibility of a gender-equal society where women choose
marriage partners on a par with young men: "in this moder age and indeed at all
times it is unfair and improper to impose a husband on a girl. Veronica deserves
praise" (n.pag.).
This robust, bestselling core of texts promotes the ideal of honest, romantic,
and "wonderful love" between young people. Love finds its Nigerian heroine in
independent women like Agnes (Iguh, Agnes in the Game of True Love), who
rejects her village parents' intervention and sticks loyally to her preferred partner,
Billy. Similarly, Okenwa Olisah's story of Elizabeth's choice of marriage partner
(Elizabeth My Lover) is prefaced by its moral: "Take note as from now that LOVE
works wonders, and that it is not all that easy to separate two sweethearts who are
in deep love, or impose a husband on a girl who doesn't like the man" (3). Love's
power is even preserved in Rufus Okonkwo's suspicious text, Never Trust All
That Love You, which asks, "What is love? Love is a wonderful affection" (9).
In spite of the apparent transformation from a "traditional" patriarchy requir-
ing high bride-price in exchange for its daughters, to a new, male-authored urban
worldliness where women make their own marriage choices and refuse to be
circulated in a rural market place, a hegemonic masculinity is preserved. One
form of patriarchal power has been discarded, set aside for another, updated
version. The masculine power structure is only apparently destabilized when

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 Stephanie Newell 61

Chief Cookey makes his comic, futile assertions of authority over his independent
daughter in Veronica My Daughter by Ogali. If Veronica chooses her husband,
Michael, against her father's will, both masculinities encircle her, agreeing on
what constitutes the "good wife" in Nigerian society.
The repetition of characters, themes, and scenes indicates both ideological
agreement and areas of mutual anxiety shared between texts, as masculinity
undergoes what Connell terms "cognitive purification" (246). This purification is
accompanied by a fixation with "good-time girls," who are the most ambivalent,
subversive, and common female type in the pamphlets, manipulating the young
educated class and avoiding marriage in ways that suggest a dangerously uncon-
trollable female autonomy. Called the "highlife queen" by Donald J. Cosentino
(55), the unmarried and materialistic woman is a law of her own, bounded by no
man: flowing across popular Nigerian art forms, she is described and commemo-
rated in Highlife lyrics and so dances to her own tune in the hotels and bars
of pamphlets. The template of this woman circulates constantly in the market
literature economy, marking out areas of petrification in authors' and readers'
masculinities.
If one considers the limited economic and career possibilities available to
women in urban Nigeria during decolonization, the representations of them in
popular literatures of the period can be seen to actively reinforce a restrictive gen-
der ideology. Such restrictions become manifest in didactic, nonfictional texts,
where the sexually assertive, economically ambitious new woman emerging in
urban Nigeria is condemned: self-determining women are described as "harlots"
and they are challenged to defend themselves against the charges. The streams of
accusations often degenerate into misogynistic tirades, dismissed too easily in a
commentary by Ulli Beier as "tedious" and "amusing harangues" (14-15). The
"money-monger" triggers masculinist anxiety like no other female figure in mar-
ket literature. Full of life, lies, and independence, "the girl born and trained in
township loves to play 'highlife' and knows in and about love making"
(Nnadozie, Beware of Harlots 18). The most paranoid of authors resort to simple
novelistic solutions to the problem of these women: "Get Rid of Them," Asani
writes in despair (Olusola 6).
The attempt to locate female figures of blame for the perceived moral degen-
eration of society leads to a chaotic, contradictory form of reasoning in many
pamphlets. Pamphlet authors brutalize and blame women even when the storyline
manifestly abdicates them and re-locates blame with young male protagonists.
The power of their project to stabilize the masculine ideology is so great that
authors are oblivious to their own characters' contradictions.
Critics have often noted the excessive emphasis on "Western modernity" in
the pamphlets and their unquestioning promotion of European life- and love-
styles in opposition to "traditional" African sexual moralities (see Ayers, "Ogali
A. Ogali and Coal City"; Obiechina, An African Popular Literature and Onitsha
Market Literature). No template of Western womanhood is transplanted directly
from Euro-American gender discourse into pamphlets, however. Instead, images
and ideals from a diversity of cultural sources are borrowed and re-inscribed,
never represented in an intact form.
Obiechina suggests that the pamphlet authors are materialistic new consumers
who embrace the social transformations wholeheartedly and are "enamoured of

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62 Research in African Literatures

the possibilities which come with change" (Onitsha Market Literature

Obiechina's point is borne out in the photograph of the boyish author Moneyh
on the final page of Why Harlots Hate Married Men and Love Bachelors (1960
dressed in cowboy gear and carrying a rifle, Moneyhard poses with a look of s
anguish that the Western masculinity he enacts is dislodged. These incongruo
attitudes are rare, however, for "the West" is not often imitated so directly. Inst
the idea of the West is absorbed into a syncretic popular form that draws its inf
ences from many cultural centers.
The newly- and semi-literate readers addressed by the pamphlets, Beier
observes, are "people who have not yet gone very far in being 'westernized',
who already find themselves in sharp opposition to traditional ways of life"
Peter K. Ayers notes the persistence of "the basic belief that material prosperi
defined in Western terms, is the desired end of life" (108). From this perspect
a cultural recolonization is occurring, using market literature as its tool and r
ning against the tide of vociferous, contemporary African nationalisms. This vie
which has dominated market literature analysis, leads critics to dismiss Niger
popular literatures for uncritically endorsing Westernization and a new alienat
Obiechina's study is replete with such binary maneuvers, which assume popul
literature's cultural impurity (Onitsha Market Literature 32, 65-72).
In an effort to erase intellectual dichotomies and move beyond the essenti
ism they imply, market literature can be regarded instead as embarking on
urgent project to socialize young male immigrants to cities. In spite of the rej
tion of selected customary practices, the residue of un-reconstructed
un-stereotyped traditions does remain in Nigerian market literature. Not only
texts actively utilize oral narratives, as discussed earlier, but the emphasized f
ininity promoted in pamphlets draws heavily from a consistent set of gender ro
If the rural patriarch's voice has been excised, the inherited masculine ideolog
persists. So the "good wife" is expected to be loyal, obedient, fertile, and subm
sive, inheriting many of her domestic duties from the good wife of Nigerian fo
tales. Chief Cookey's rural insistence on a wife's subservience is echoed in t
pamphlet writers' claims that women are men's helpmeets, created "to be und
them and to obey them" (Nnadozie, What Women are Thinking About Men 6)
Pamphlet writers also insist-and this explains the vehemence of their hatr
for "harlots"-that marriage is designed to fulfill one purpose: the production
children remains paramount in market literature, superseding the romantic lo
which brings couples together. Carried forward from precolonial gender archiv
the requirement to produce many children is translated, in market literature, in
a masculine fantasy of female domesticity that is no longer appropriate to urb
economies. When "harlots" choose their immoral lifestyles, Moneyhard wri
"they forget to remember that the most important thing a woman could want is
child and without the child the woman is useless to the man" (2). Childbearin
just one of the many feminine virtues that prostitutes and urban women forget
remember. Advice pamphlets are also unwilling to forgo the process of inquir
into a woman's background before proposing marriage: texts are hardly breaki
away from historical marriage patterns when they insist on a detailed inspect
of "the exact genealogy of the girl" (Njoku, How To Write Love Letters 7). Wh
is the overthrow of "tradition" in a pamphlet that states that "it is always bet
to marry from one's own tribe, or more homely still from one's own town

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 Stephanie Newell 63

possible" (Obodoechi 11)? In spite of authors' insistence on an ideological rupture

between fathers and sons, then, elements of a continuous masculine ideology are
inherited by urban writers.
Moving beyond binary analyses, and towards an appreciation of the complex
process of cultural brokerage taking place in the texts, we can view the pamphlet
writers' engagement with so-called modernity as a more syncretic process (see
Barber, "Popular Arts"). Just as the African "natives" constructed by colonial dis-
course were not simple receivers, acting out racial scripts, so writers were cultur-
al arbiters, re-modelling society. "Modernity" in market literature is not a simple
attempt to replicate European lifestyles and love-scenes, but a complex process of
selection and absorption. We need not view this process as one in which writers
"pulverized . . . material, reducing everything to crude pulp" (Lindfors 54).
Perhaps the time has come to replace the idea of African popular literature's
Westernizing "modernity" with the notion of its "worldliness," preserving a
cultural pluralism at the core of the writing process: as Kwame Appiah argues in
In My Father's House, the postcolonial subject is a multiple being situated with-
in this plurality.
If a primary dichotomy exists in market literature, it is not between "tradi-
tion" and "modernity": as we have seen, many aspects of customary marriage
practice are retained, considered pivotal to the ideology of urban masculinity.
Instead, a more specific division arises that is inextricable from the writers' posi-
tion as members of a youthful urban class emerging into the decolonizing nation.
The opposition is between the so-called "illitrates" and their literate offspring.
Love letters are promoted as a sign of the new generation's civilization, actively
excluding those men who are considered incapable of moder romantic emotions
because they cannot write. "Illitrates" (or "illitretates") are treated with contempt
in the pamphlets, called "bush men" by educated characters who recognize that
"love letters play an important part in the game of love" (Abiakam n.pag.). Using
the classroom to instate a new class structure, pamphlet authors reinforce a
reader's sense of urban sophistication, affirming the reader's lifestyle, albeit
financially insecure. The reader is actively socialized by pamphlets that consoli-
date prejudices against village beliefs, supporting the decolonized generation's
movement into urban areas and their rebellion against the vertical, direct authority
of parents and elders.
Writers are using the written word to claim the written word's supremacy:
writing has become the physical sign of a psychological rupture from rural par-
ents. The old village patriarchs who attempt to impose husbands on their primary-
schooled daughters are disempowered by the texts, made to suffer pamphlet
writers' wrath. Such a father cannot comprehend romantic sentiments, for he is
"not educated as to be able to read some novels to know about the work of love"
(Olisah 11). Written by a newly literate class, the pamphlets celebrate their own
appearance, writing their own masculinity and revelling narcissistically in the per-
manence of writing and its ability to link up individuals across time and space.
The themes, protagonists, and preoccupations of Nigerian pamphlet literature
are of immense relevance to the study of contemporary, locally produced popular
literatures. A greedy, ambitious, and promiscuous femininity emerges within the
first few pages of almost every locally published contemporary novel, bearing a
beautiful body, triggering recognition in the reader as she declares her personal

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64 Research in African Literatures

agenda: "first, she wanted a wealthy husband; [second,] a man she could com
mand and order about; and thirdly, she preferred a man who lived in the cit
(Adinde 5). Acting out a residual text from the 1960s in which the hero is or
nary, rather than exceptional, this particular heroine ensnares Dennis, an hon
tailor from Enugu. The outcome of the tale is predetermined by her type o
womanhood, which allows for no solution other than her fall.
Contemporary novelists, writing in and about sprawling urban environmen
where strangers interact daily, offer more than the symptoms and representatio
of urban anxiety. Like the pamphlet writers in the 1960s, they also teach interpr
tive strategies, ways of reading the bodily signs emitted by strangers. Sexua
deceitful and financially cunning women continue to be portrayed in local pub
cations in the process of disguising their intentions beneath beautiful exteriors:
ambiguous, dangerous "lip-painted ladies" of market literature have become
fixed, in contemporary literature, as stereotypical "good-time girls." Recurring
popular fiction, the single city woman in white-collar work signals one thing: se
ual promiscuity. " In Nigerian market literature, authors attempted to disentan
the different urban femininities, separating upright and independent-minded he
ines from "husbandless harlots" (MacJonah, Association of Husbandless). Les
ambiguous and apparently more confident, contemporary writers have erased
disparity between women's innocent, beautiful surface appearances and their ruth
less underlying intentions. The masculine anxiety, clustering around a range
female bodies in market literature, has congealed into a stereotype: one particu
surface-smiling, made-up, urban and beautiful-has become the very sign of
the greed and sexual power it tries to conceal. All except one young, physical
perfect female in recent unedited fiction has upheld this type, which is devoid
inward honesty and compassion for her fellows.1l
Current versions of literary masculinism and the range of representations
Nigerian femininities can be compared with the formulas and characters of the o
pamphlet literature. There are of course differences between the production
content of pamphlet literature and contemporary popular fiction, not least arisin
from the appearance in the mid-1970s of mass-produced African popular fict
commissioned by multinationals. The heavy editing of novels published by mu
nationals and the larger national publishers12 tends to smooth out linguistic quir
and re-form the text according to formulas that circulate internationally, predom
inantly in Europe and America (see Coulon).
The small printers of the 1950s and 1960s were by no means neutral, how
ever. Like current locally produced popular fiction, the pamphlet was circulat
in the local economy as a commodity with a short shelf life. The entrepreneu
who purchased and published market literature intervened directly in the prod
tion of texts, anticipating readers' tastes by commissioning, re-writing, re-namin
cutting, and supplementing material (Dodson 1973). In this way, a set of conv
tions, or writers' tools, emerged in the pamphlets: such tools have been pas
down to contemporary popular novelists, who produce stories of "harlots" a
"good-time girls" that draw heavily on the images and ideals of earlier text
re-constructing and interrupting local and international fictional formulas.

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 Stephanie Newell 65

NOTES

1. This research was made possible by grants from the Carnegie Trust for th
Universities of Scotland and by Stirling University's Internal Research Fund. The
assistance is gratefully acknowledged.
2. The symbol ! indicates the preservation of authors' and typesetters' original spelling
similarly, the original grammar of texts has been preserved.
3. Hegemonic masculinity, R. W. Connell writes, "must embody a successful collect
strategy in relation to women" (184-86). Masculinity is defined by Connell not i
terms of an unshakable cultural dominance by men, but as an ideological contestatio
taking place in society, in which the ascendant gender ideal subordinates other for
mations of masculinity and is itself subordinated.
4. Connell labels such rejected, former masculinities "subordinated masculinitie
against which the emergent "hegemonic masculinity" is defined (183).
5. The names and titles listed are: Elizabeth Ema Brown, The Installation (1963),
Margaret U. Ekpo, European Women as I See Them (1953), Miss A. I. Nwafor, Igb
Poems (1960), and Esther Kike, Preoccupations: A Collection of Poems (1973).
have been unable to locate any of these texts and would welcome information on the
whereabouts.
6. Advice is offered to young women as well as to men, but the primary addressee is
constructed as male. Even when authors advise women on correct behaviors, the
female that is addressed tends to be a constructed, female type.
7. The popularity of Okonkwo's text is suggested by the fact that it went into six
editions over the span of a decade; another "suspicious" popular text, Moneyhard's
Why Harlots Hate Married Men and Love Bachelors, went into sixteen editions and
continued to be reprinted throughout the 1980s.
8. Mission readers-particularly Catholic booklets counselling young people on adoles-
cence, love, and marriage-probably influenced pamphlet writers, guiding both their
selection of subject matter and the tone of their advice. In particular, pamphlets writ-
ten by authors born in the late nineteenth century manifest the influence of mission
schools and texts in indigenous languages; e.g., Joseph Adesuyi Ajayi, born 1885,
wrote on Christian marriage and Christian behavior (1962); see also Samuel
Ade-Kahunsi Akinadewo's pamphlets.
9. Between 1956 and 1965, estimated sales of Veronica My Daughter topped 100,000.
See Hogg and Sternberg.
10. For an extensive discussion of the representations of masculinity in contemporary
unedited fiction, see my "Petrified Masculinities? Contemporary Nigerian Popular
Literatures by Men."
11. The single exception is Paul Agu's Victims of Love (1989), in which the beautiful
heroine, Betty, remains loyal to her boyfriend until he deceives her at the end.
12. Popular fiction is commissioned throughout Africa for the Heinemann Heartbeats
series and Macmillan's Pacesetters series. In Nigeria, Spectrum Books and
Fagbamigbe follow a similar commissioning and editing policy.

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66 Research in African Literatures

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