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Onitsha, Anambra

6.1414° N, 6.8021° E

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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.

Words Sule Danjuma

8 min read

The road bridge over the River Niger, carrying traffic east.
The Niger bridge at Onitsha. Everything moving between the west and the south-east crosses here. Photograph: Hadassah Photostorie group / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

About Onitsha

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

The Niger bridge at Onitsha is a single point of failure for the movement of goods between western Nigeria and the south-east, and everyone who uses it knows this. It has known it for fifty years.

On the eastern side is the Main Market, which is a city inside the city and is generally described as the largest in West Africa. That claim is impossible to verify and nobody in Onitsha is much interested in verifying it.

A market stall hung with stockfish in several sizes.
Photograph: BishopNana / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

The pamphlets are collectors' items now, held in university libraries in three countries. They were written to be read once and thrown away, which is a fate their authors would probably have preferred to canonisation.

The Niger bridge seen along its length between Onitsha and Asaba.
Photograph: Hadassah Photostorie group / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Who reported this

Sule Danjuma

Writer · Makurdi

Covers rivers, farming and the places where the two arguments meet. Grew up on the Benue and has never really left it.

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