7 - Female Critical Communities in Nigerian Pamphlet Literature: ‘Beware of Women’

Summary

In her study of Black intellectual life in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, Merve Fejzula (2022) argues that while women often participated on a par with men in the exchange of ideas, their presence is frequently overlooked by scholars for whom supposedly ‘menial’ forms of intellectual labour – editorial, secretarial and logistical – do not achieve the same recognition as the printed materials produced by men. To restore the visibility of women, Fejzula argues, historians require an expanded conception of the archives to include non-traditional materials and spaces, alongside a broader understanding of what constitutes intellectual labour to include ‘chores’ like fundraising and cooking, as well as other tasks undertaken by women (424). Using similarly expansive methods, feminist historians of Nigeria and West Africa have produced maps of women's intellectual labour and political power dating back to precolonial times, re-inserting women into traditional structures of political authority, and using the written archives of the mid- to late-colonial period to highlight women's robust presence in newsprint cultures as printers, editors, journalists and writers (Achebe 2011, Denzer 1994, Mba 1982, Gadzekpo 2001).

Given that only one Onitsha pamphlet, sadly no longer extant, was found under the name of a woman, Fejzula's injunction to expand our archives and methods to include the full infrastructure of intellectual production is all the more necessary if we wish to find signs of women's intellectual presence in Nigerian newsprint cultures of the 1950s and 1960s. The pamphlet – Cecilia D. Akosa's Stirring of a Heart – was purchased for £12 by the publisher George O. G. Ume-Ezeoke (aka ‘Gogue’) in 1950, making it one of the earliest Onitsha romances, predating Ogali's Veronica My Daughter by six years (Dodson 1974: 118). The existence of Stirring of a Heart implies the presence of an irrecoverable archive of locally published women's writing in a period when increasing numbers of Nigerian women occupied public positions as journalists and political activists, and when authors such as Flora Nwapa started to achieve international recognition, transforming African literature published in the Global North by giving sustained attention to female interiority.

Women are occasionally named in the prefaces and introductions in Onitsha pamphlets, where they are thanked by male authors for their input as typists, proof-readers, storytellers and informants.