The last decade has seen the emergence of a new kind of film industry in Nigeria. The results are known as ‘home movies’ – they are shot straight onto video and sold direct to the public. One of the new, independent television stations, MBI, was the first to air a home movie every evening. The slot was so popular that the Government-owned Nigerian Television Authority quickly followed suit.

The main market for home movies is Lagos, the commercial capital and home to the majority of the independent stations, although the half-dozen leading production companies – Nek Video Link, O.J. Productions, Infinity Merchant, Contec, Andy Best and Amaco – are all based in Onitsha, the market town on the banks of the River Niger that spawned the equally popular phenomenon known as ‘Onitsha market literature’, which flourished from the late 1940s until the outbreak of the civil war in 1967. These were chapbooks inspired by the Indian pamphlets brought back by Nigerian soldiers who had fought in Burma and the Far East. They had titles like Beware of women, My seven daughters are after young boys, and Money hard to get but easy to spend. Like the home movies, which are in many ways their successors, they had no artistic pretensions, but were concerned only to reach the widest possible audience. They were churned out at high speed and quickly went out of print. Topicality was everything, which was why many of them weren’t even dated. Most sold between three and four thousand copies, although the two most popular, Veronica My Daughter (1957) by Ogali A. Ogali and the Nigerian Bachelor’s Guide (n.d.) by A.O. Ude, sold 60,000 and 40,000 copies respectively.

The chapbooks were soon eclipsed by the novels of a new generation of university graduates – among them, Achebe, Soyinka and J.P. Clark-Bekederemo. Their work was snapped up by London publishing houses, although Cyprian Ekwensi, whose People of the City (1952) was the first Nigerian novel published abroad, had already cut his teeth as a pamphleteer with two titles, When Love Whispers and Ikolo the Wrestler and other Ibo Tales (both published in 1947). Unfortunately, neither is available – an indication of how low Ekwensi’s stock has fallen in recent years – yet in his best novel, Jagua Nana (1961), the story of an ageing prostitute (‘they called her Jagua because of her good looks and stunning fashions. They said she was Jag-wa, after the famous British prestige car’), he caught the underside of modern urban life in Nigeria with a racy realism which clearly influenced the liveliest of the market literature, notably Adventures of Four Stars by J.A. Okeke Anyichie and Mabel the Sweet Honey that Poured Away by Speedy Eric.