Abstract

There remains a dearth of scholarly historical rhetoric about advertising - commercial communications - in Nigeria, which is not akin to declaring that it is extinct. This paper locates commercial activities, such as advertising and marketing, within the vicissitudes of pre-colonial and/or colonial Nigeria. The analysis posits that pre-colonial Nigeria maintained a thriving, sophisticated trade-by-barter, fuelled primarily by word-of-mouth and town crier communications. The barter trade worked because participating caravan traders respected the—socially engineered—system: the honor code. The arrival of colonialism, novel governmental paradoxes, such as political mobilizations, and a sense of citizenship, had a lasting impact on commercial activities in Nigeria.