JALA Winter-Spring 2008-Vol 2 No 1 - African Literature Association

old Onitsha market was flattened by “repeated shelling in 1967” during
what is now described as the Nigerian civil war. After the Biafran3
capitulation, Onitsha quickly re-established itself as a major trading
centre and a new market was soon under construction.” (1973: 175). The
new market was never to be like the one that was destroyed.
A man of his time, Ogali recognized that the global current, which
he witnessed, was not a mere flash in the pan. He understood that his
les than educated readership needed a guide in this new world. He gave
them what he thought they wanted in different literary genres and in
different languages. He was interested in history as he was in
contemporary matters of culture, literature and politics. He published
in Igbo, his ethnic language, as well as in the “English language.” In his
pamphlets, we recognise the soul of that era. In one pamphlet after the
other, Ogali eloquently talks about the things that matter to the Onitsha
market people at that time. His pamphlets carefully plot the stories of
the Onitsha market locality to the readership. The pamphlets reveal the
anxieties as well as aspirations that the period. At the core of the anxiety
of that generation of writers, and the patrons they wrote for, was the
uncertainty which the notion of “highlife” about, especially for people
who experienced this “highlife” modernity from the bottom of the street.
By dramatizing the uncertainty that came with the “highlife” modernity,
Ogali is able to capture the soul of that social and upheaval that took
place in the Onitsha of the 1950s and the 1960s before the Nigerian civil
war razed down this prosperous town on the river Niger. As part of the
enunciation of the anxiety of this period, especially as it was expressed
in the conundrum of the meeting between the Onitsha locality and the
eccentric current of global tides, Ogali’s pamphlets call attention to the
euphoria expressed by this locality as it consciously accepted what its
saw as the brave new world. The pamphlets also call attention to
moments of disillusionment that came with the global current of
uncertainties. This new brave world is best articulated in the Onitsha
notion of the “highlife.” If there is one Onitsha market pamphleteer that
embodies that sense of the “highlife,” it is Ogali Ogali. In the early Ogali,
which includes Veronica My Daughter, Ogali Ogali shows this aspect of
quite clearly. But his playful display of the spirit of the time cannot be
properly understood outside of the temperament of Onitsha, the city by
the river Niger. The larger story of the success of the Onitsha market
pamphlets is intricately connected to the freedom, which this city gave
to these popular writers, printers and readers. Ogali’s pamphlets
eloquently express the cultural trade that followed the production of a
local capitalism in Onitsha at the time.
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