“O! Sir I do not know either to kill myself or to stay”: Childhood Emotion, Poverty, and Literary Culture in Nigeria, 1900–1960

This article concerns the expression of fearful emotions in the correspondence of Nigerian children written to the British colonial government requesting assistance during the 1940s. Unlike most existing works that use materials composed by adults to research children’s history, this paper employs sources composed by children themselves. It views the children’s letters as an integral aspect of colonial African literary culture, an important contribution that scholars have overlooked. The overall objective of this article is to stimulate the study of the emotions of African children within the broader history of social change during the first half of the twentieth century.