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Amos Tutuola’s Palm Wine Drinkard has the distinction of being the first African novel to have achieved international recognition. The acclaimed English poet, Dylan Thomas it was who influenced its critical reception through a laudatory early review. The ensuing attention thus gave Tutuola’s book a cult- like status in the West. But at home Tutuola’s fellow Nigerians were at first embarrassed. Many educated Nigerians were just simply horrified by the book. They deplored his crudities, his lack of inhibition and the folktale basis of his romances. For they found this too common place for their sophisticated tastes. [Collins]

Tutuola’s limited social background itself is sufficient explanation for such a rejection of his effort from his country folks and the quaint rarity of his work itself. Born in 1920 in Abeokuta in the Western Region of Nigeria to a peasant family, he grew up amidst a great store of traditional Yoruba culture. He was in particular subjected to a regular diet of traditional stories. Tutuola heard his first folk stories at his Yoruba-speaking mother’s knee. Tutuola along with Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, belongs to this over-4-million strong Yoruba tribe who are well noted for their vivacity, as well as creativity. When he was about 7 years old, one of his father’s cousins took him to live with F.O. Monu, an Ibo man, as a servant. Instead of paying Tutuola money, he sent the young boy to the Salvation Army primary school. He then attended Lagos High School for a year, and worked as a live-in houseboy for a government clerk in order to secure his tuition at the school.

Two years later, it is said, after starting school, in 1930, Tutuola’s education and general welfare were entrusted to a guardian under whose watchful care he made rapid progress in school. However, the oppressiveness of his guardian’s wife soon forced him to return to his father who resumes supporting his education out of the proceeds of his cocoa farm. But upon his father’s death in December 1938 whilst Amos was in form one his 6 years education came to a grinding halt for 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 Forces as a blacksmith, This he did for a short while from 1942 to 1943 and then, after an unsuccessful attempt to open his own blacksmith shop he tried a number of other vocations, including selling bread, before he relapsed into virtual unemployment.from which he was relieved later by being engaged as a messenger in the Department of Labor in Lagos.

It was whilst working at the Department of Labor that Tutuola wrote his first novel, The Palmwine Drinkard. He was stimulated 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 full-length book, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, within a few days – “I was a story-teller when I was in the school,” he later said.. .In an interview Tutuola revealed that in writing that novel he was striving to call the attention of “our young men, our young sons and daughters” who did not pay much attention to our traditional ….culture….” to turn away from European culture to remember our customs, not to leave it to die…”

The first draft was written in two days and was brought out by a British publisher eight years later. Tutuola remembered when the publishers contacted him (They) were wondering whether I had made it up or got it from somebody because it is very strange to them. They wondered because they were surprised to see such a story…they wanted to know whether I had made it up or got it from somebody else. The Palm-Wine Drinkard was first published in 1952 in London by a major British publisher, Faber and Faber, and next year in New York by Grove Press.

Most of his critics and reviewers concede his imaginative prowess.

Mr. Tutuola tells his story as if nothing like it had ever been written down before….One catches a glimpse of the very beginning of literature that moment when writing at last seizes and pins down the myths and legends of an analphabetic culture. [The New Yorker]

The narrative is imaginatively rich, with imagery drawn from both African legends and modern realities….. The Palm Wine Drinkard may not be, indeed a product of genius, but it is certainly that of an unusual talent……. [Larrabbee]

… Tutuola is not merely an original writer, but also an original; a wayward, fanciful, erratic creative artist….. whose fertile imagination works gaily. [Times Literary Supp.]

Tutuola has imagination…….He may not possess the genius of the most imaginative writers at work but he can hold his own for sheer invention. [Ekwensi]

Right from the start, 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 Palmwine Drinkard) is the brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching story, or series of stories, written in young English by a West African, about the journey of an expert and devoted palm wine drunkard through a nightmare of indescribable adventures, all simply and carefully described in the spirit-bristling bush…….. The writing is nearly always terse and direct, strong, wry, flat and savory, the big and often comic terrors are as near and understandable as the numerous small details of price, size, and number, and nothing is too prodigious or too trivial to put down in this tall, devilish story (p. 8). [Dylan Thomas]

He is in a sense an epic poet who as a man belongs nowhere and this isolation is both his tragedy and his artistic-strength……. (Whatever) his sources, in his best work Tutuola makes something new from his material. He writes very much out of himself, and his writing stands alone, unrelated to any other Nigerian writing in English. There is a tremendous courage about the man, for he has been able to go on alone, remaining true to an inner sight which perceives both the dazzling multi colored areas of dream and the appalling forests of nightmare (Margaret Lawrence 1968)

“nothing is too prodigious or too trivial to put down in this tall, devilish story.” Dylan Thomas in The Observer (6 July, 1952)

The work was praised in England and the United States, but Tutuola’s most severe critics were his own countrymen, who attacked his imperfect English and attacked him for presenting a disparaging 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 in the Arts Theatre of the University of Ibadan, in April 1963, with the Yoruba composer Kola Ogunmola in the leading role.

In the 1950s Tutuola wrote My Life on a Bush of Ghosts (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”. A reviewer described it in Presénce Africaine as the “expression of ghosts and of African terror, alive with humanity and humility, and extraordinary world where the mixture of Western influences are united, but one always without the least trace of incoherence.” .

In The Brave African Huntress (1958) heroic women continue the theme of the quest. Tutuola seems to display as ever the gifts of a famous village storyteller, often telling of dreams, the most basic source of archetypal images.

After The Palm-Wine Drinkard Tutuola never had quite the same success. He continued to explore Yoruba traditions and folkloric sources, and published such works as The Witch-Herbalist of the Remote Town (1981) and The Village Witch Doctor and Other Stories (1990). In these works ghosts, sorcerers, and magic continue their existence in the modern world of clocks, televisions, and telephones. “Having related her story and said that if I am licking the sore it would be healed as the sorcerers said, so I replied – “I want you to go back to your sorcerers and tell them I refuse to lick the sore.” After I told her like this she said again – “It is not a matter of going back to the sorcerers, but if you can do it look at my palm or hand.” But when she told me to look at her palm and opened it nearly to touch my face, it was exactly as a television, I saw my town, mother, brother and all my playmates, then she was asking me frequently – “do you agree to be licking the sore with your tongue, tell me, now, yes or no?” (from ‘Television-handed Ghostess’ in My life in the Bush of Ghosts, 1954)

Throughout many of his most productive years Tutuola worked as a storekeeper for the Nigerian Broadcasting Company. In 1957 he was transferred to Ibadan, Western Nigeria, where he started to adapt the work for the stage. In 1969 the first full-length study of Amos Tutuola, written by Harold Collins was published.. Tutuola became also one of the founders of Mbari Club, the writers’ and publishers’ organization in Ibadan. 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 moved back to Ibadan. He died on June 8, 1997.