ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of a genre of African literary collections commonly known as the "Onitsha market literature" in the construction of gender and identity discourses in the late colonial and early postcolonial eras. It illustrates with the Onitsha market books and chapbooks, the lettered Africans leveraged the power accorded them by Western education to construct a peculiar form of narrative that tried to shape or even impose ideas and behaviors, including how women should and should not behave. In connection with this study of the Onitsha literary collections, the chapter adopts an eclectic approach in distilling how African women were narrated in the colonial and early postcolonial eras. The Onitsha literary works emerged in the late colonial era as an attempt by the emergent educated elite and urban dwellers in this densely populated West African commercial city to claim a commanding voice in the ongoing sociocultural reordering that defined the colonial encounter between Europe and Africa.
