My presentation focuses on the development of a literary and print culture in mid and late colonial Northern Nigeria. My contention is that, while colonial policies on mass literacy were instrumental to the emergence of this literary tradition, as scholars have shown, an important element in its development of a writing and reading culture was the advent and popularity of travel by Muslim elites to the imperial metropole, Britain. I will analyze how travel to Britain, the travel narratives the travelers published in vernacular and English language newspapers, and the material goods and ideas they took back with them to Nigeria enabled local aristocrats and intellectuals to participate robustly in the colonial discourse of modernity and to undertake projects of modernization that inscribed them more deeply in the colonial system. The paper will demonstrate that travel to Britain and the texts that documented it were crucial sites for the enactment of African narrative, literary, and modernist agency.