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A six-month scholarship was offered to him in 1963 by West Germany, but he did not
accept it.
By the time Tutuola’s third novel was published, there was some improvement in his
standard of English, but there also was a growing disenchantment with his work. Africans continued to criticize both his bad habits and his borrowings, and Europeans intimated
that his “improvement” had a negative effect on his work, which they also criticized for being repetitive. To some, he was now deliberately childish, whereas before he had been
pleasingly childlike.
By the 1970’s, however, Tutuola was again receiving praise from both African and Eu-
ropean critics, who were beginning to see his writings for what they were: not true novels, but linked stories in the monomythic tradition. Some see him as the equivalent for world literature of the akpala kpatita (professional storyteller) of Nigeria. (Jorge Amado, the popular Brazilian writer, shows the influence of Tutuola in his own writing.) This renewed and more balanced attention directed toward Tutuola is surely one of the factors that led to his publishing a book in 1981, the first in more than a decade, and an extended tour of the United States in the 1980’s, during which he spoke and took part in symposia. Thanks to
some fine scholarly detective work by Bernth Lindfors, the handwritten original manu-
script of what was to be Tutuola’s first novel, The Wild Hunter in the Bush of Ghosts, was found; it was then published in 1983. As a result, both scholars and biographers of the
Yoruba writer had to do considerable backtracking. Published by Three Continents Press
with a typeset script facing photocopies of the original handwritten pages, it is significant as a minor work at an early stage of Tutuola’s development. Furthermore, as Lindfors puts it in his introduction to the book, it is “the first long piece of prose fiction written for publication in English by a Nigerian author.”
Analysis
Although it is certainly possible to enjoy Amos Tutuola’s novels on their own merits—
merits that include economy of language, a strong storytelling voice, a marvelous self-assurance on the part of his narrators (almost always in the first person), fantastic imagination, and virtually nonstop action—it is useful to look at him within the context of Yoruba culture. The Yorubas are a people of western Nigeria who both have embraced Western
culture and have remained intensely connected to traditional ways. The Yoruba people
make up about 20 percent of the population of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and one of its best educated. Although Christianity is the religion of virtually all Yoruba
people, there is a deep undercurrent of animism.
As with Tutuola’s narrators, contemporary Yoruba people see nothing unusual in a
world where churches coexist with magical charms ( juju) and the deepest and most im-passable jungles (the bush) are filled with spirits, both those of the dead and those of nonhuman beings. Yoruba folklore is characterized by a belief in a distant but benevolent su-250
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preme deity and the presence on the earth of numerous smaller “gods” and powers, often
anthropomorphic. It is still common practice for both adults and children to sit around in the evening and listen to folk stories much like those in Tutuola’s books. In some cases, they do so while drinking palm wine, a mildly alcoholic beverage made from the sap of
palm trees.
Inexpensive or “free” primary education in British-style schools, often run by
churches, was common when Tutuola was a child, and this exposure, from his tenth year
until his late teens, provided Tutuola with the necessary tools—literacy and a knowledge of literary forms (from simplified classics in the schools to books published in Yoruba)—
to begin his career as a writer. One thing those schools did not give him, however, was the confidence of one who knows a good story and is not afraid to tell it. It was that self-assur-ance (so clearly echoed in the gentle strength of all of his various protagonists) that led a junior clerk, a man in a lowly position in an extremely class-conscious colonial society, to dare to send his first writings to a publisher.
The Palm-Wine Drinkard
The Palm-Wine Drinkard begins with the narrator telling us a bit about himself. “I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life.” These first words hardly prepare readers for the mythic dimensions of the character seen later in the book, but the prodigious amounts of palm wine he consumes (225 kegs every twenty-four hours) give us the hint that he is no ordinary human. When his palm-wine tapster falls from a tree and dies, the Drinkard sees that the only thing he can do is seek out his tapster in the land of the Dead. This sets the mythic tone of the book and all the rest of Tutuola’s work. The Drinkard enters the bush, a netherworld inhabited by spirits and strange creatures. His first encounter, with an old man who sets him the Herculean task of capturing Death, reveals to us the Drinkard’s superhuman powers.
His other name, he tells us, is “Father of gods who could do everything in this world,” and his success in capturing Death (who then escapes, which is why “we are hearing his name
about in the world”) proves that his title is no idle boast. The Drinkard’s next exploit is to rescue his wife-to-be from a skull who has borrowed body parts to masquerade as a
“Complete Gentleman.” Thereafter, he and his wife continue on his quest, but not before
she becomes pregnant (in her thumb) and gives birth to a miraculous and dangerous half-
bodied child who must be destroyed before they can continue on their way. They do even-
tually reach the town of the Dead, despite the menace of such beasts as a Spirit of Prey with eyes like searchlights and with the help of the Drinkard’s powerful jujus and such beings as the Faithful Mother, whose servants buy the Drinkard’s death and rent his fear.
Novelistic plot development in the conventional sense does not exist in this or
Tutuola’s other romances; the various episodes are almost interchangeable. The Drinkard, however, does learn a lesson at the end of the novel. His tapster has now (like a student in a European school or an apprentice blacksmith) “qualified” as a full dead man. He cannot
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return to the living. Instead, he gives the Drinkard and his resourceful wife, who has developed into something of a Sibyl, a miraculous egg. The Drinkard and his wife return to the land of the living. There he finds a famine and, sending a sacrifice to Heaven, brings rain to the people—an ending that seems to recapitulate the conclusion of a traditional creation story.
In one of the best analyses of Tutuola’s style, Lindfors concludes that his books are not novels at all; instead, they are, in content, structure, and style, concatenated folktales. Both African and English critics have noted the structure of the quest and the rite of passage that also characterize Tutuola’s extended narratives. They always begin with the introduction of a main character; the sending out of that character into the world, where many hardships are encountered; the overcoming of all obstacles; and the return of the hero or heroine in triumph. This structure is both that of The Pilgrim’s Progress and that of the epic stories of Yoruba (and other African) cultural heroes as they overcome death, use their
personal magic to change themselves into animals or objects, and travel through a world
fully as hostile as real life. To describe either Tutuola’s stories or African folklore as escapism, in fact, is quite inaccurate. The worlds of Simbi, of the Brave Huntress, and of the Drinkard are graphically horrifying. They are no more an escape than would be a series of vivid nightmares.
The flavor of the stories is that of the naïve tall tale. Almost anything is possible in such accounts
, even turning oneself into a stone and then throwing oneself to escape. The
reader (or the listener, for the voice in Tutuola is that of an oral storyteller) is carried along by the headlong rush of events, the total acceptance of this illogical world by the narrators (who always live well within this world, playing and winning by its rules), the humor and humanity that are among the author’s greatest virtues. Furthermore—and here both
Tutuola’s Christian faith (which is very real) and the folktale tradition come into play—
these are moral tales. There are always lessons to be learned. No one commits a foolish action without having to pay the consequences. Good is always eventually rewarded; evil is always strong but eventually defeated.
There is a clear structure to each of Tutuola’s books, a beginning and an end that are
carefully linked. The Drinkard’s search for his tapster ends with his finding him and learning a lesson as a result of all of his efforts—a lesson that was unexpected on the protagonist’s part but that the reader responds to and understands. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts begins with the central character not knowing what “good” or “bad” or hatred is. It ends, after twenty-four years of trials and wandering in the bush, with these words: “This is what hatred did.”
A cornucopia of horrifically memorable menaces confronts Tutuola’s protagonists in
each of the books. Indeed, this may be one of the more serious of Tutuola’s failings, the very abundance of monsters and fabulous encounters in each of his stories (although those monsters are invariably memorable and individually characterized with surprising economy). After a certain point, especially when one reads a series of Tutuola’s novels in a 252
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short space of time, events and characters begin to blur and one feels overwhelmed. It was probably with this overabundance in mind that the dramatic version of The Palm-Wine
Drinkard was created out of only eight of the twenty episodes found in the book. In his essay “Amos Tutuola: A Nigerian Visionary,” Gerald Moore characterizes the first two nov-
els as quest romances and ties them to the monomyth of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). Considering that Tutuola’s stories follow the pattern of Yoruba storytelling sessions, only a bit more extended, and those stories often relate creation myths, it is not surprising that Moore should find that pattern.
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
It is difficult to use conventional critical apparatus in dealing with Tutuola. It is equally difficult to summarize easily any of his books, for they consist, like his first book, of a loosely organized, helter-skelter collection of fantastic events that have their own logic.
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts presents its readers with another character like the Drinkard, but possessed of less magic. He is, however—like the Drinkard—resourceful,
plucky, and often very shrewd. He is not fortunate enough to have a wife like the
Drinkard’s, but Tutuola makes up for that in the characters of both Simbi and the Brave
African Huntress in his later books. They are women of purpose, wonderfully self-reliant, and as capable as his male heroes. Simbi engages in heroic combat with a “Satyr”
(Tutuola’s names for his mythic creatures are often drawn from Western mythology but
have nothing at all to do with the original beings in Western myth) who is ten feet tall, covered with blood and feathers, “an impatient and ill-tempered, impenitent and noxious
creature.” The Brave African Huntress vows death to all the “pygmies” (small creatures
that resemble the various dwarflike forest creatures of African myth rather than human beings) who have either killed or “detained” her four brothers. She proceeds to do so with bloodthirsty efficiency, burning the pygmy town, blowing it up with gunpowder, and then
picking off the pygmies one by one with her gun as they run from the ruins. After rescuing her brothers, she proceeds to sell the minerals found in the Jungle of the Pygmies and
becomes wealthy.
The world that is inhabited by the characters in all of Tutuola’s writing is an interesting one in another way. It contains no Caucasians. Aside from one brief reference to a set of footprints made in the rocks near Ife by “the first white men who had traveled from heaven through that rock to the earth,” one finds no Europeans in his books. Instead, the books are set in an African Africa, albeit an Africa affected by Western inventions and institutions such as newspapers, gunpowder, the Methodist Church, and airplanes. Though it may be
unintentional, certain sections of Tutuola’s novels—such as the description of the Dead
Cousin who has become a Methodist bishop in the “10th Town of Ghosts”—seem to be
parodies of real events in Nigerian history. More often than not, Western objects appear in Tutuola’s similes—as when he compares the sound of the skulls chasing the Drinkard to
“a thousand petrol drums pushing along a hard road.” His is thus not an ideal Africa, but 253
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one rather like the West Africa of the early nineteenth century, when the influence of the slave trade had deepened rivalries between such African states as Oyo and Dahomey and
created a climate of continual warfare and uncertainty. In this world, Tutuola’s heroes and heroines are much like many Yoruba people of today, men and women who deal with an
increasingly complicated world with pragmatism, shrewdness, and even humor.
Joseph Bruchac
Other major works
short fiction: “The Elephant Woman,” 1956; “Ajaiyi and the Witchdoctor,” 1959;
“The Duckling Brothers and Their Disobedient Sister,” 1961; “Akanke and the Jealous
Pawnbroker,” 1974; “The Pupils of the Eyes,” 1974; “The Strange Fellows Palm-Wine
Tapster,” 1984; “Tort and the Dancing Market Woman,” 1984; Yoruba Folktales, 1986; The Witch Doctor, and Other Stories, 1990.
nonfiction: Tutuola at the University: The Italian Voice of a Yoruba Ancestor, 2001
(lectures; Alessandro Di Maio, editor).
Bibliography
Achebe, Chinua. “Work and Play in Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard.” In Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Novelist Achebe’s perceptive article about Tutuola’s novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard is included in this collection of essays examining art and literature.
Afolayan, A. “Language and Sources of Amos Tutuola.” In Perspectives on African Literature, edited by Christopher Heywood. New York: African Publishing, 1971. Afola-
yan’s essay assesses Tutuola’s contribution to Yoruba literature from a Yoruba
perspective.
Ajayi, Jare. Amos Tutuola: Factotum as a Pioneer. Ibadan, Nigeria: Creative Books, 2003.
Ajayi, a Nigerian journalist, spent sixteen years researching and writing this first English-language biography of Tutuola, which discusses, among other subjects, the novel-
ist’s motivations for creative writing and how he was exploited by publishers. Also in-
cludes interpretations of Tutuola’s work.
George, Olakunle. Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. George examines writings by Tutuola and three other
Nigerian writers—Daniel O. Fagunwa, Wole Soyinka, and Chinua Achebe. He uses
several modern critical theories, including poststructuralism and postcolonialism, to
interpret these writers’ works.
Gera, Anjali. Three Great African Novelists: Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Amos
Tutuola. New Delhi, India: Creative Books, 2001. Gera’s examination of Tutuola—
along with novelists Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka—focuses on the use of the
Yoruba and Igbo storytelling traditions in his work. Gera describes how Tutuola adapts
these traditions to define himself and his society.
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Irele, Abiola. “Tradition and the Yoruba Writer: Daniel O. Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola, and
Wole Soyinka.” In Perspectives on Wole Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity, edited by Biodun Jeyifo. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Irele’s essay compares
Tutuola’s work with that of two other Yoruba writers. The essay should be read with
Afolayan’s essay in Perspectives on African Literature.
Lindfors, Bernth, ed. Critical Perspectives on Amos Tutuola. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1975. This collection of essays, edited by a respected Tutuola
scholar, provides critical insight into Tutuola’s individual novels. Includes a bibliog-
raphy.
Onyeberechi, Sydney E. Critical Essays: Achebe, Baldwin, Cullen, Ngugi, and Tutuola.
Hyattsville, Md.: Rising Star, 1999. Essays on African and African American litera-
ture, featuring critical commentary on Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o,
Countee Cullen, and James Baldwin.
_______. “Myth, Magic, and Appetite in Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard.”
MAWA Review 4 (1989): 22-26. Often cited as one of the best studies of Tutuola’s masterpiece. A brief but comprehensive study.
Owomoyela, Oyekan. Amos Tutuola Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1999. An excellent
introduction to Tutuola’s life and works, written by a Yoruba writer and scholar.
Owomoyela argues that Tutuola symbolizes the African tradition from the time of co-
lonialism to postcolonialism. Includes notes, references, a selected bibliography, and
an index.
Quayson, Ato. “Treasures of an Opulent Fancy: Amos Tutuola and the Folktale Narra-
tive.” In Strategic Transformation in Nigerian Writing: Orality and History in the
Work of Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka, and Ben Okri. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1997. A sound treatment of the element of orality in
fiction by Tutuola and three other Nigerian writers. Quayson focuses on Tutuola’s