by Amos Tutuola palm wine drinker it has the distinction of being the first African novel to have achieved international recognition. It was acclaimed English poet Dylan Thomas who influenced its critical reception through a laudatory early review. The resulting attention gave Tutuola’s book cult status in the West. But at home, Tutuola’s fellow Nigerians were initially embarrassed. Many educated Nigerians were simply horrified by the book. They deplored his crudeness, his disinhibition, and the folktale basis of his novels. Because they found this place too ordinary for their sophisticated tastes. [Collins]
Tutuola’s limited social environment itself is a sufficient explanation for such rejection of his effort by the people of his country and the picturesque oddity of his work itself. Born in 1920 in Abeokuta, in western Nigeria, to a peasant family, he grew up amidst a wealth of traditional Yoruba culture. In particular, he was put on a regular diet of traditional stories. Tutuola heard the first popular stories of him at the knee of his Yoruba-speaking mother. Tutuola, along with the Nobel Prize winner, Wole Soyinka, belongs to this Yoruba tribe of more than 4 million people who stand out for their liveliness and creativity. When he was about 7 years old, one of his father’s cousins took him to live with FO Monu, an Ibo man, as his servant. Instead of paying Tutuola money, he sent the boy to the Salvation Army primary school. He then attended Lagos High School for a year and worked as a live-in servant for a government employee to secure his enrollment in the school.
It is said that two years later, after starting school, in 1930, Tutuola’s education and general welfare were entrusted to a tutor under whose watchful care he made rapid progress at school. However, the oppression of his tutor’s wife soon forced him to return to his father, who continues to support his education with the profits from his cocoa farm. But after his father’s death in December 1938, while Amos was in first grade, his 6-year-old’s education came to a complete halt because no one else could finance it. He tried his luck as a farmer, but his crop failed and he moved to Lagos in 1940. During World War II he worked for the Royal Air Force as a blacksmith. This he did for a short time from 1942 to 1943 and then, after an unsuccessful attempt to open his own blacksmith shop, tried a number of other vocations, including selling bread, before falling back into virtual unemployment, from which he was later released on being hired as a messenger at the Department of Labor in Lagos.
It was while working at the Department of Labor that Tutuola wrote his first novel, The palm wine drinker. He was prompted to write it after reading an advertisement placed by a Christian publisher that had printed collections of African Stories. In 1946, Tutuola completed his first complete book, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, in a few days: “I was a storyteller when I was in school,” he later said… In an interview, Tutuola revealed that in Al writing that novel, he was striving to draw the attention of “our young people, our young sons and daughters” who did not pay much attention to our traditional… culture…. “to get away from European culture to remember our customs, to don’t let him die…”
The first draft was written in two days and published eight years later by a British publisher. Tutuola recalled when the publishers contacted him (They) wondered if I made it up or got it from someone because it seems so strange to them. They wondered why they were surprised to see such a story… they wanted to know if I had made it up or if I had gotten it from someone else. The palm wine drinker it was first published in 1952 in London by a major British publisher, Faber and Faber, and the following year in New York by Grove Press.
Most of his critics and reviewers acknowledge his imaginative prowess.
Mr. Tutuola tells his story as if nothing like it had ever been written before… The very beginning of literature is glimpsed, that moment when sixteen years are finally written and the myths and legends of an illiterate culture take shape. [The New Yorker]
The narrative is imaginatively rich, with images drawn from both African legends and modern realities… The palm wine drinker it may not, in fact, be a product of genius, but it certainly is that of unusual talent…. [Larrabbee]
… Tutuola is not only an original writer, but also an original; a wayward, fanciful, erratic creative artist… whose fertile imagination works happily. [Times Literary Supp.]
Tutuola has imagination… She may not possess the genius of the most imaginative writers at work, but she can hold her own by sheer invention. [Ekwensi]
From the very beginning, the reader is drawn into a magical world in which events occur exactly as the subconscious mind would represent them in a dream. [Balogun]
(The palm wine drinker) is the short, thorough, lurid and fascinating story, or series of stories, written in young English by a West African, about the journey of an expert and devoted palm-wine drunk through a nightmare of unspeakable adventures, all simple and carefully described in the bush that bristles the spirit …….. The writing is almost always concise and direct, strong, ironic, flat and tasty, the great and often comic terrors are as close and understandable as the many small ones details of price, size, and number, and nothing is too prodigious or too trivial to put into this high and devilish story (p. 8). [Dylan Thomas]
In a sense, he is an epic poet who, as a man, belongs nowhere and this isolation is both his tragedy and his artistic force… (whatever) his sources, in his best work, Tutuola make something new out of your material. . He writes a lot of himself, and his writing is independent, unrelated to any other Nigerian writing in English. There is tremendous courage in man, because he has been able to go on alone, holding true to an inner vision that sees both the dazzling multi-colored areas of dream and the ghastly forests of nightmare (Margaret Lawrence 1968)
“Nothing is too wondrous or too trivial to put into this high and devilish story.” Dylan Thomas in The Observer (July 6, 1952)
The work was praised in England and the United States, but Tutuola’s harshest critics were his own countrymen, who attacked his broken English and attacked him for presenting a derogatory image of Nigeria.
The work survived the storm and became part of the classics of African literature. The stage version of the novel was first performed at the University of Ibadan Arts Theater in April 1963, with Yoruba composer Kola Ogunmola in the title role.
In the 1950s Tutuola wrote My life in a ghost bush (1954), an underworld odyssey, in which an eight-year-old boy, abandoned during a slave raid, flees into the bush, “a place of ghosts and spirits”. One reviewer described it in african presence as the “expression of ghosts and African terror, alive with humanity and humility, and an extraordinary world where the mixture of Western influences come together, but always without the slightest trace of incoherence”. .
In The brave African hunter (1958) Heroic Women continues the theme of the quest. Tutuola seems to display as always the gifts of a famous village storyteller, often speaking of dreams, the most basic source of archetypal imagery.
After The palm wine drinker Tutuola never had the same success. He continued to explore Yoruba traditions and folk sources, publishing works such as The witch-herbalist of the remote city (1981) and The town witch doctor and other stories (1990). In these phantom works, wizards and magic continue their existence in the modern world of watches, televisions and telephones. Having recounted his story and said that if I licked the sore it would heal as the wizards said, I then replied, “I want you to go back to your wizards and tell them that I refuse to lick the sore.” he told her like that she said again – “It’s not a matter of going back to the sorcerers, but if you can look at my palm or hand” touch my face, it was exactly like a television, I saw my people, mother, brother and all my classmates game, so I frequently asked myself – “do you agree to be licking the sore spot with your tongue, tell me, now, yes or no?” (from ‘Television-handed Ghostess’ on My life in the Bush of Ghosts1954)
During many of his most productive years, Tutuola worked as a stockman for the Nigerian Broadcasting Company. In 1957 he was transferred to Ibadan, in western Nigeria, where he began to adapt the play for the stage. In 1969 the first complete study of Amos Tutuola, written by Harold Collins, was published. Tutuola also became one of the founders of the Mbari Club, Ibadan’s organization for writers and publishers. In 1979 he was a research fellow at the University of Ife and then an associate of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In the late 1980s, Tutuola returned to Ibadan. He died on June 8, 1997.