From the Bookstalls of Onitsha Market to the Internet: Digitizing Popular Nigerian Literature

Onitsha Market Literature consists of stories, plays, advice and moral discourses published primarily in the 1960s by local presses in the lively market town of Onitsha, an important commercial site in the Igbo-speaking region of southeastern Nigeria. In the fresh and vigorous genre of Onitsha Market Literature, the commoner wrote pulp fiction and didactic handbooks for those who perused the bookstalls of Onitsha Market, one of Africa's largest trading centers. Twenty-one pamphlets from Onitsha Market appear on the Internet at http://www.ku.edu/~onitsha. The pamphlets are fully digitized and annotated to exemplify styles of expression found in this intriguing form of African popular literature. They are part of a unique collection of 101 pamphlets from Onitsha now held at the Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas located in Lawrence, Kansas U.S.A.
This poster presentation will highlight our digitization initiative--the first full-text digitization of Onitsha pamphlets that makes them available to a worldwide audience via the Internet. At the ALLC/ACH 2004 conference we will discuss various issues related to our completed project and suggest appropriate uses of the digitized pamphlets for humanities computing.
Onitsha market literature is grounded among the masses, and it is their voices that we hear in this amazing collection. The works were aimed at the new literate class of Nigerians such as taxi drivers, mechanics, white-collar clerks, primary school teachers, small-scale entrepreneurs and traders (1). In simple English basic concerns about sex, money and style enthralled a vibrant cross-section of Nigerians (2). Local publishers supplied creative and enticing reading matter to a public with a literary appetite that in turn gained confidence in the local uses of English. Scholars hail this popular literature, in part "conditioned and compromised by the marketplace," as a major impetus for an eager literate public to experiment with more serious and dynamic works of creative writing (3). A "multilingual and multicultural heritage" is present in the Nigerian English of the pamphlets, and our poster presentation will highlight this conference theme.
Although African literary artists such as Chinua Achebe, Mariama Bâ, Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong'o hold well-deserved positions of honor as the creators of beautiful and exceptional literature, most of the authors of popular market literature remain unknown and unseen beyond the market. This digitization initiative introduces these 'invisible' authors to the widest audience possible--the Internet, and provides a context to fully understand and appreciate this literature for the masses. The style of the market literature is firmly grounded in African oral traditions with plays, riddles and jokes as common features (4). Thus, the Onitsha pamphlets reflect earlier African oral texts and their rich histories. The digitization of a portion of the university's Onitsha collection permits the cultural heritage embedded in these publications to gain notoriety through contemporary technological channels. Just as eager readers purchased Nigerian market literature 40-50 years ago, this initiative makes Onitsha pamphlets accessible once again to a wide-ranging readership on the Internet.
The project to digitize selected texts from the Onitsha market literature collection at the Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, became a reality through a grant provided by the university's Digital Library Initiative. This initiative invited faculty to submit proposals for the digitization of research collections that might benefit from this new application for enhanced access via the Internet. Enhancing access to the collection for purposes of classroom instruction and research were a central focus of the project throughout its design and implementation.
The most important issue that had to be carefully researched to make the site possible was that of Nigerian copyright law. The ultimate question to be answered was whether there would be copyright infringement under Nigerian copyright law of works published in Nigeria in the relevant time period if the KU Libraries were to digitalize these works and place them on a website for the purpose of making these materials available to scholars everywhere. As determined by the University of Kansas Office of Legal Counsel, Nigerian copyright law in effect at the time of publication provides an exclusion for use of a copyrighted work that encompasses "fair dealing" for research, review or criticism, and that the "fair dealing" exception would be applicable in our situation. Therefore, it was possible for the project to proceed as long as reasonable effort was made to locate publishers and authors who may be current holders of copyright. An extensive search for any such copyright holders was not successful in locating any current copyright holders for the 21 works proposed for digitization.
While the original idea for the proposal focused on the possible digitization of the entire collection of over 100 titles, it soon became evident that this expectation would need to be scaled back. Due to the modest resources available from the Digital Library Initiative, the alternative of digitizing only 21 of the titles in the total collection became necessary. Titles were then chosen that were deemed to be thematically and stylistically representative of the total collection.
Another key decision had to do with the creation of a website to contextualize the works to be digitized. This truly became a team project with various aspects of the site developed cooperatively by various members working on the project. The principal investigators for this project will make the poster presentation at the ALLC/ACH 2004 conference. Elizabeth MacGonagle is an Assistant Professor of African History at the University of Kansas and Ken Lohrentz is the African Studies Librarian at the University of Kansas Libraries. Drawing on their complimentary expertise, each will discuss issues related to computing and the humanities that stem from this successful digitization project.
Endnotes:
1. "Popular Culture: Popular Literature" in Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara (Scribner's Sons, 1997) v. III, 452.
2. Kurt Thometz, comp. Life Turns Man Up and Down: high life, useful advice, and mad English: African market literature (Pantheon, 2001), xviii.
3. Encyclopedia of Africa, v. III, 444-445, 452, 538.
4. Cavan M. McCarthy, "Printing in Onitsha: some personal observations on the production of Nigerian Market Literature," African Research and Documentation, 35 (August 1984), 22.