Nigerian Student Verse, edited by Martin Banham and published by the University of Ibadan, is a small anthology of enormous historical significance. It gathers poetry written by students at the University of Ibadan in the years immediately before Nigerian independence — and among those students were several who would become the defining figures of modern Nigerian literature.
To read this anthology is to catch writers at the moment before they became writers: before Ṣóyínká had won the Nobel, before Achebe had published Things Fall Apart (he had, just barely), before any of them knew what they would become. The student verse is sometimes awkward and sometimes startling, but it is alive with a particular kind of ambition — the ambition of a generation that understood, or was beginning to understand, that it was making history.
That this copy returns to the University of Ìbàdàn, where many of its contributors studied, is the right ending for it.