In my dissertation, I examine the discursive, affiliative, and material influence of the Mbari movement on trends in African publishing beginning in the 1960s. The second critical period of emergence, which is happening right now, is characterized by the emergence of (primarily) Nigerian LGBTI literature over the last decade and a half, both before and after the passage of the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act of 2013 and the public debate that led up to the law’s passage. I argue that to understand the present state of Nigerian sexual publics and queer counterpublics, we must understand discourses of homosexuality and anti-homosexuality in relation to both indigenous sexual publics and the heterosexual public imported under colonial rule. More broadly, I am interested in tracing a genealogy of influence from the modernist arts counterpublic of Mbari into the queer counterpublics of African LGBTI literature today.