Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún and Uju Anya will join librarian and collector Kurt Thometz for a conversation on Onitsha Market Literature at the 2026 New York Black and African Literature Festival (NYBALF), taking place September 18-20 in Harlem, New York. The panel, titled “The Market and Popular Literature,” is scheduled for Sunday, September 20 at 11:30 a.m. at Harlem Stage’s Gatehouse. It will revisit the publishing culture that flourished in Onitsha from the late 1940s through the 1960s, when traders, printers and schoolteachers produced widely circulated pamphlets on love, morality, ambition, city life and everyday survival.
The second edition of NYBALF returns to Harlem with three days of conversations, readings, performances, workshops and encounters connecting writers, artists and thinkers from Africa and the wider Black diaspora. The festival’s 2026 theme, “The Village in the Book: Literature and the Near,” asks what literature owes to the places, languages and communities closest to it, and how writers respond when larger forces such as migration, politics, history and social change become intimate and local. The theme builds on the festival’s broader mission of creating connections between continental African and diasporic Black communities through literature and culture.
Túbọ̀sún, a Nigerian linguist, writer, editor and filmmaker, has recently turned his attention to this literary history through Life Turns Man Up and Down, a documentary he is writing and directing on Onitsha Market Literature. Produced by OlongoAfrica, the film traces the pamphlet trade and the people preserving its surviving texts. Túbọ̀sún previously directed Ebrohimie Road: A Museum of Memory, a documentary about Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka and the University of Ibadan bungalow where Soyinka lived and was arrested in 1967. Anya brings a personal connection to the Onitsha tradition: her father, Udegbunem Anya, wrote pamphlets under three different pseudonyms. Thometz, whose private collection of Onitsha pamphlets anchors Túbọ̀sún’s documentary, will provide an archival perspective. Together, the panel will consider who literature is made for, what ordinary readers have historically sought from books, and what contemporary publishing can learn from a literary culture that flourished without metropolitan permission.
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