Onitsha Market Literature refers to a number of pamphlets, books and other publications sold at the Onitsha

Onitsha

Onitsha is a city, a commercial, educational, and religious center and river port on the eastern bank of the Niger river in Anambra State, southeastern Nigeria....

 Market in Nigeria

Nigeria

Nigeria , officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a federal constitutional republic comprising 36 states and its Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The country is located in West Africa and shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in...

 in the 1950s and 1960s. Much of it was written in pidgin

Pidgin

A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the...

 and creole

Creole language

A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...

varieties of English. This form of literature is now interesting to researchers as a secondary source of information about social conditions of the time; general readers can appreciate it for its creative use of colorful, non-standard English as well as its often racy plotlines.

Further reading

• http://onitsha.diglib.ku.edu/index.htm
  • http://onitsha.diglib.ku.edu/bibliography.htm
• http://www.indiana.edu/~libsalc/african/onitsha.html
• http://www.nigeriafirst.org/printer_1396.shtml

• "Life Turns Man Up and Down",(a collection of selected market pamphlets) by Kurt Thometz