This exciting book takes us right to the moment when a new literary genre was born. Between 1929 and 1930 the Lagosian newspaper Akede Eko (Lagos Herald) published a series of letters from a dying ex-prostitute, Sẹgilọla. She had married a loving and indulgent husband, but after her wedding she entertained a clutch of besotted paramours, then ran off with a wealthy businessman to the Gold Coast. She returned to Lagos upon her mother's death, and, lacking her constraining influence, she entered into a life of ‘promiscuity and debauchery’. It was at the end of her life that she wrote her life story for Akede Eko. Her eyes have swollen, an invasive worm infests every inch of her skin, pus streams from both nostrils, and she is ‘almost starving in the middle of the city where I was born’ (p. 131). She narrates her life story, she says, in order to enable readers to ‘learn from my example, wretched woman that I am, for the reformation of your own journeys through life’ (p. 207).

Sẹgilọla's life story caused a stir. One generous reader donated ten shillings towards Sẹgilọla's maintenance. Another asked the newspaper's editor for a photograph of Sẹgilọla in her humiliated state, for it would allow him to say, ‘Come and see the results of promiscuity or loose living – see the person in disgrace!’ (p. 353). Such was the interest in Sẹgilọla's life story that, in 1930, the editor published it as a book, entitled (in translation) The Life Story of Me, ‘Sẹgilọla of the Fascinating Eyes’, She Who Had a Thousand Lovers in Her Life.

All of it was fiction, composed by Isaac Babalọla Thomas, editor and proprietor of Akede Eko. Over the course of many years he disguised his authorship of Sẹgilọla's life story, presenting himself as her copy-editor and publisher. In this edition, Karin Barber shows us how Thomas worked up the literary energy to compose this, the first novel written in the Yoruba language. There is a translation of the text, in all its enriching complexity; a collection of the letters and editorials occasioned by Sẹgilọla's appearance in the newspaper; a copy of the rather plain English translation that Thomas published in 1931 and 1932; and a wonderfully illuminating introduction from Barber herself, which sets Sẹgilọla and Thomas firmly within the Lagos of the late 1920s. The book is a remarkable work of scholarly industry, the fruit of many years of concentrated, difficult labour, and a characteristically generous gift to Yoruba readers and to scholars and students of African literature.

I. B. Thomas wrote fiction in order to instruct, guide and reform his readers. We are never given access to Sẹgilọla's interior self, nor is there an omniscient narrator who can move seamlessly between settings and characters. Sẹgilọla is, as Barber argues, an archetype: her narrative is that of public discourse. Her life story is structured around a set of formulaic texts that were circulating in Lagos in the 1920s. In one passage, she inserts her name into Psalm 51, making it into a lament concerning her own sinfulness (p. 253). In several places – thirty-eight in all – she quotes songs that were then on the lips of Lagosians. Thomas's book was, Barber argues, a ‘feast of popular, shared culture’ (p. 74). It was a shared culture that was only then coming into being. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, political life had been dominated by Lagos's Saro elite, who jealously identified themselves with their British rulers in order to distinguish themselves from up-country commoners. But during the 1920s, elites and commoners found themselves thrust together. British officials had deposed the Eleko, the ruler of Lagos, in 1925, and the campaign for his reinstatement united elites and commoners in popular activism. At the same time, the Yoruba-reading population was expanding dramatically, as tens of thousands of primary school-leavers filled the bottom rungs of the social and economic order. Thomas's book is an early presentiment of an expanding public sphere. Its jokes, songs and references to current events invoke a shared cultural repertoire, a set of reference points that Lagosians in general could enjoy.

Sẹgilọla did not arise, whole, from the author's imagination. Her narrative took form in a field where literary men were already addressing new kinds of publics, but that did not diminish the author's literary accomplishment. Thomas had to practise the compositional mode that he would later adopt in his story of Sẹgilọla: in 1926, for example, he published an article written in the voice of a worried mother, instructing her daughter about her conjugal duties (p. 45). Once she was on the page, Sẹgilọla could play multiple roles for her creator. Thomas seems to have derived pleasure from his use of Sẹgilọla's voice. In August 1929, for instance, he published an editorial in which he commented on the lessons to be learned from Sẹgilọla's life of dissipation and debauchery. A week later, he had Sẹgilọla respond to his editorial. She concluded that ‘you, editor, are one of the most insightful and wise people anywhere in the world’ (p. 119). Sẹgilọla is in some ways a creation of Thomas's self-interest. But she was more than that. Even as Sẹgilọla sermonizes about the evils of prostitution, she also revels in poetic expressions of sexual liberty. Even as she proclaims her fealty to conservative ideas about womanly duty, she gleefully threatens to reveal the names of the eminent men with whom she once had commerce. Sẹgilọla presents her life as an object lesson for others to learn from but she also celebrates her own agency.

Contrary to the title of the distinguished series in which it is published, Thomas's book is something more than an ‘African Source for African History’. In Barber's vivid translation Sẹgilọla nearly leaps off the page, accosting the reader with her dramatic, hyperbolic confessions. Thomas's book is literature, a work of imagination, a starting point for a whole body of creative writing in the Yoruba language. All of us owe Karin Barber a tremendous debt of gratitude for bringing Sẹgilọla, with all of her vehemence and conviction, to a twenty-first century audience.