Dispatch
Everything crosses at Onitsha
A river port with what is often called the largest market in West Africa, and one bridge holding it all together.
South-East
Onitsha
Anambra State
6.1414° N, 6.8021° E
A river port with what is often called the largest market in West Africa.
About this place
Onitsha sits on the east bank of the Niger at the point where the bridge crosses, and it has been a trading town since long before that bridge. The Main Market is a city inside the city. In the 1950s and 60s the town produced Onitsha Market Literature — cheap pamphlets on love and money and how to behave — which is one of the few genuinely popular literary movements the continent has had.
Everything from Onitsha
3 stories, newest first.
Photo essay
Ikpu ite: the pots and the last people making them
Hand-built water pots, made the way they have always been made, by women who are candid that nobody young is learning.
Food
What a market day actually costs
Ugu, tomatoes, peppers and stockfish: the arithmetic behind a stall, and why the price is never only the price.
People in Onitsha
Dispatch
Everything crosses at Onitsha
A river port with what is often called the largest market in West Africa, and one bridge holding it all together.
Photo essay
Ikpu ite: the pots and the last people making them
Hand-built water pots, made the way they have always been made, by women who are candid that nobody young is learning.
Food in Onitsha
Food
What a market day actually costs
Ugu, tomatoes, peppers and stockfish: the arithmetic behind a stall, and why the price is never only the price.
Field notes from Onitsha
Sule Danjuma
The queue for the bridge on a Friday afternoon starts about four kilometres out and is entirely predictable, which has produced a whole roadside economy along the approach — food, fuel in bottles, phone charging. The congestion is somebody's living.
Where to go next
Editorial adjacency rather than distance — somewhere it makes sense to go from here.
