Aderinto, S. (2015). Modernizing love: gender, romantic passion and youth literary culture in colonial Nigeria. Africa, 85(3), 478-500. DOI: 10.1017/S0001972015000236

Saheed Aderinto shows how romantic love appeared in print media and modernized African romantic love. He explains that modern romantic love did not simply replace “traditional” or “precolonial” cultural norms. This new literary model of Nigerian love was a hybrid version of African and Western cultures of love.

The texts of Nigerian media print were mostly written on African textual and print culture, gender, marriage, and sexuality which existed under colonial rule. Those few written books gave little attention to romantic passion. On the other hand, Africans were seeking new ways to convey their emotions for the reading public’s consumption. In his article, Saheed Aderinto analyzes the literary culture of colonial Nigeria and looks at how love was shown at that time in Africa’s history.

The author examines colonial Nigerian newspapers during the early half of the 20th century, with a focus on the West African Pilot‘s advice column “Milady’s Bower,” which ran from 1937 until the 1950s.