Literature & Ideas
Landmark
Amos Tutuola
1920 – 1997
The Palm-Wine Drinkard, the first widely read African novel in English
Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the Nigeria Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
He put Yoruba folklore into English prose and produced a book unlike anything published before it — the first West African novel to find a large international readership.
Amos Tutuola had six years of schooling, trained as a blacksmith, and was working as a messenger for the Labour Department in Lagos when he wrote The Palm-Wine Drinkard in a few days.
Faber published it in 1952. It follows a man whose palm-wine tapster has died and who walks into the land of the dead to fetch him back, and it is written in an English that runs on Yoruba grammar and Yoruba narrative logic — one marvel giving way to the next with no explanation and no apology. Dylan Thomas reviewed it with delight and it sold across Europe and America, the first book by a West African writer to do so.
Nigerian critics were at first embarrassed by it, objecting that the English was wrong and that Europeans were enjoying it for the wrong reasons. That judgement reversed completely. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and several more books followed, and Tutuola is now read as the writer who established that the English novel could be made to work in an African grammar rather than the other way round.
Faber published it in 1952. It follows a man whose palm-wine tapster has died and who walks into the land of the dead to fetch him back, and it is written in an English that runs on Yoruba grammar and Yoruba narrative logic — one marvel giving way to the next with no explanation and no apology. Dylan Thomas reviewed it with delight and it sold across Europe and America, the first book by a West African writer to do so.
Nigerian critics were at first embarrassed by it, objecting that the English was wrong and that Europeans were enjoying it for the wrong reasons. That judgement reversed completely. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and several more books followed, and Tutuola is now read as the writer who established that the English novel could be made to work in an African grammar rather than the other way round.
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