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and inspired case of a man who borrows money for a
living. He puts great pride into his work. When a debt
collector comes to claim a pound back off him, the borrower
kills himself rather than fail in his occupation.
The collector himself has great pride and kills himself
to follow the debt into heaven. A curious bystander,
who has witnessed this great contest of wills, also stabs
himself in order to see the final outcome. On the cases
he presides over, the narrator defers judgement as long
as he can, offering an appeal to the reader:
“so I shall be very much grateful if anyone who
reads this story-book can judge one or both cases and
send the judgement to me as early as possible, because
the whole people in the ‘mixed town’ want me very
urgently to come and judge the two cases”.
Towards the end of the story, the narrator is able to
avert a great famine through the use of a magic egg.
However, the crowds this miraculous act brings to his
house are keeping him awake and the grumpy saviour
decides he’s done enough good work. In this way, Tutuola
wickedly sidesteps good behaviour.
Despite its comparisons with other oral traditions,
The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a text, very much a work
of printed fiction, rather than transcription. The book
makes great use of parenthesis, abbreviation, appeals
to the reader and a series of charming and sometimes
baffling banner headlines (“WHO WILL TAKE THE
MOUSE?” and “AFRAID OF TOUCHING TER-
BUY Amos Tutuola books online from and
RIBLE CREATURES IN BAG”). These stylistic tics
give the novel an even greater personality and (to this
reader) more mystery and vitality. The recognized
elements of the western novel – narrative resolution,
ethical dialectics and psychological mapping – are
not considerations of such writing. Unlike The Lord
Of The Rings, there are no appeals to sentiment or
emotional identification. Therefore, no agenda of
good and evil. Similarly, literary decorum is absent.
Tutuola’s style is both loose and terse and reads as
spontaneous. This is both exciting and somewhat
disorientating, which befits a picaresque journey
through strange, strange territory. Tutuola’s bush land
is a place of magic, where all the roads have ended.
The Palm-Wine Drinkard is our guide.
Post-script: Having written out of ignorance, I did
some research. The Palm-Wine Drinkard was originally
composed in 1946 – quickly, almost on a whim – by the
semi-itinerant, basically educated Tutuola. It had an interesting,
meandering path to publication six years later
and was quickly praised (by white readers) and damned
(by Nigerian authors and academics). Ironically, both
viewpoints seem to stem from the rusty old issue of
authenticity; the novel apparently conforming to Western
stereotypes of the primitive to Euro-American eyes
whilst failing in its faithfulness to Yoruban storytelling
traditions to African ears. Oyekan Owomoyela is the
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