A new documentary is being made about Onitsha Market Literature, the remarkable pamphlet trade that flourished in the southeastern Nigerian market town for roughly two decades on either side of independence.

Written and directed by writer and linguist Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún and produced by OlongoAfrica, Life Turns Man Up and Down takes its title from one of the pamphlets produced during the period. The film asks a simple but larger question: what happens to a literature that never asked permission?

Between roughly 1947 and 1966, clerks, traders, teachers and school-leavers in Onitsha were writing and publishing short books about romance, courtroom drama, politics, love, money and everyday life. The books were printed on the same small presses used for invoices and funeral programmes, then sold from market stalls for a few pence.

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The trade produced titles such as Never Trust All That Love You, Beware of Harlots and Many Friends and Mabel the Sweet Honey That Poured Away. They found readers outside the established literary audience and created a publishing culture that was largely independent of the institutions that determined what counted as literature.

It disappeared almost as quickly as it emerged. Life Turns Man Up and Down follows some of the people who preserved the pamphlets when there was no formal institution keeping them, while tracing what happened to the writing after the trade ended. The film also looks at Onitsha's later transformation into one of the centres of Nigeria's home-video industry, roughly three decades after the pamphlet era.

The documentary's central figures include some of the people who have kept the history of the trade alive. Linguist Uju Anya appears as both witness and interpreter. Her father, Udegbunem Anya, wrote for the market under three different pseudonyms.

Kurt Thometz, a private librarian based in New York, has spent decades collecting the pamphlets and making the case for their place in Nigerian literary history. Scholar James Yeku considers what happens to a print culture when it is digitised, including what may be carried across and what may be lost.

Elspeth Healey and Elizabeth MacGonagle of the University of Kansas discuss how the pamphlets eventually found their way into the Kenneth Spencer Research Library in the American Midwest, and what they reveal about Nigerian life that official histories of the period often overlook.

The production is also scheduled to feature Don Dodson, who interviewed dozens of pamphlet writers, publishers and readers during a brief revival of the trade in 1971; Georges Ekwensi, the eldest son of novelist Cyprian Ekwensi, whose earliest books were printed and sold through the same trade; writer Chuma Nwokolo; and Onookome Okome, whose scholarship has examined the connection between the Onitsha pamphlets and Nollywood.

Filming has already taken place in New York, Lawrence, Kansas and Maryland. Further shoots are planned in San Francisco and Edmonton before the production moves to Onitsha and Lagos. There, the filmmakers will visit the market, printing presses and the families of the writers whose work emerged from the trade. Post-production will follow.

Karin Barber, Georges Ekwensi, Stephanie Newell and Kurt Thometz are advising the project, with Olajide Salawu serving as associate producer.

Alongside the documentary, OlongoAfrica is developing a companion archive of Onitsha pamphlets. Its collection currently includes eleven titles, among them The Struggles and Trial of Jomo Kenyatta, The Nigerian Bachelor's Guide and How to Make Friends with Girls. Each has been catalogued and scanned in full.

The production is now seeking people who may still hold Onitsha pamphlets, photographs of the market or records from the printers who operated during the period. It is also looking to hear from relatives of pamphlet writers, as well as potential funding and festival partners.

For a publishing culture that existed largely outside the literary establishment, the surviving pamphlets offer an unusual record of the people who wrote them, the people who read them and the society around them. Life Turns Man Up and Down sets out to recover that history before more of it disappears.