The Myth, Language and Philosophy of Amos Tutuola

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August/September 2025Nigeria
Tutuola

Photo Illustration by Ezinne Osueke / THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref: SMITHSONIAN LEARNING LAB, WIKIMEDIA. 

THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / LITERATURE DEPT.

The Myth, Language and Philosophy of Amos Tutuola

For the late Nigerian writer, Amos Tutuola, death is not the end. His regeneration lives on in the surreal and fantastic landscapes of African literature. With overlapping influence across the arts, music and literature, Tutuola still journeys.
Tutuola

Photo Illustration by Ezinne Osueke / THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref: SMITHSONIAN LEARNING LAB, WIKIMEDIA. 

THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / LITERATURE DEPT.

The Myth, Language and Philosophy of Amos Tutuola

For the late Nigerian writer, Amos Tutuola, death is not the end. His regeneration lives on in the surreal and fantastic landscapes of African literature. With overlapping influence across the arts, music and literature, Tutuola still journeys.

1952 and 1954 were pivotal years in the history of African literature. Amos Tutuola had released The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts consecutively, unleashing ghostly adventures to plague and astonish readers, some of which were European literary critics. These literary critics, having experienced Tutuola’s otherworldly ‘bizarre’ narratives, were petrified by its ‘bad grammar’ and ‘ineptness of method’. Schools of literary thought in Africa and the West analysed Tutuola’s episodic narratives with the fervour of scorn or admiration. The early reviews from writers such as Eric Robinson described My Life in the Bush of Ghosts as ‘the same mixture of devilishness, grotesque adventure and naive storytelling.’ 

The reviews, some of which, emblematic of what Chinua Achebe termed ‘colonialist criticism’, bolstered the classic trope of primitivity. A derogatory term representing the homogenizing epistemology of Eurocentric modernity. African writers were expected to echo the literary prestige, style and education of Western writers, or else their works were discarded in the bin of literary savagery. Earlier reviews, which dismissed Tutuola’s works as a badly written concoction of bizarre nightmares devoid of earnest symbolism, often overlooked what Afolabi Afolayan described as ‘a temporary intermediate point in the bilingual evolution of a dialect—the dialect being the rather undefined abstraction “Nigerian English” or at least “Yorùbá English.”’ Not often mentioned were its foundational folkloric framework, drenched in the culture and traditions of a people. This gulf in the epistemology of Western and African traditions led some critics to compare the attention and enthusiasm The Palm-Wine Drinkard garnered from European readers to the way figurative African art captivated European artists like Pablo Picasso—a literary form of ‘noble savage’ idealization.  

Tutuola’s African critics, who were first and foremost victims of the Euromodernist tradition rife in colonial literary education, held that The Palm-Wine Drinkard shamefully represented a form of ineptitude the African literary tradition was wary not to prove to the Western world. Critics such as Babasola Johnson reprimanded its ‘strange lingo’ as ‘foreign to West Africans and English people, or anybody for that matter.’ These responses to Tutuola begged the question of the relationship between education and storytelling. Must African writers authenticate their stories with their level of education or with the rules of grammar and doctrine of correctness?  

Tutuola was aware of the habit of self-denigration colonial education triggered among the African elites. In an interview with Nigerian journalist, Mike Awoyinfa, he claimed: 

Probably if I had more education, that might change my writing or improve it or change it to another thing people would not admire. […] Perhaps with higher education, I might not be a popular writer. I might not write folktales. I might not take it as anything important. I would take it as superstition and not write in that line. 

Tutuola’s use of English was a driving force to revitalize the folkloric tradition in written form. He retranslated the oral tradition into a vast imaginative richness without the rigidity of rationalization. Taban Lo Liyong decried the Eurocentric education that ‘drives out of the mind superstition, daydreaming, building of castles in the air, cultivation of yarns, and replaces them with a rational practical mind, almost devoid of imagination.’ African critics were guilty of tarnishing the ‘grammar’ and ‘language’ of Tutuola’s text, going as far as denigrating the mythology and religious tradition his narratives stemmed from as superstitious and extravagantly fantastical. The critical limitations of such views are a by-product of the metaphysical hegemony of the Western religious traditions in Africa. The mythopoeic philosophies of African traditions are metaphysical elements that cannot be uncritically relegated to superstition. Folktales are not bereft of astute symbolism to steer our navigation of the world.  

TUTUOLA’S LANGUAGE AND SYNCRETISM

Tutuola’s syncretism was a springboard for creativity. A creativity that includes the controversy of ‘borrowing’ that is crucial in aggregating forms to necessitate a folkloric output that does not merely adapt from precolonial sources, but functions to transpose other modern folkloric models into a nonlinear literary body. The modern folkloric literature contemporary to Tutuola was the novels of Chief Daniel Olorufemi Fagunwa, written entirely in the Yorùbá language. Tutuola’s integration of the inspired folktales of Fagunwa into his works can be construed as a reworking, a psychic translation that sustains the timeless metaphysical narratives of the Yorùbá tradition and approximates it to the English language. In incorporating the English language into a Yorùbá syntax, Tutuola evades what Molara Ogundipe-Leslie calls ‘the problem of linguistic alienation which plagues other Nigerian writers, some of whom have at first to wrestle with the English language, before they can begin to say what they mean.’ 

Tutuola’s language is a critical necessity for interrogating deviations from literary norms. This is a recurrent, although not pervasive, form that exists in Western literature. The colloquialisms and non-standard grammar in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye are examples of classic literary texts that do not falter in their aberration from the formalist doctrine of grammatical correctness. According to the literary critic, Harold R. Collins, Tutuola’s use of tautologies—for instance, ‘But as I was telling him these sorrowful words, both his eyes were shedding tears repeatedly’—are valuable expressions for emphasis, making the phrase akin to saying, ‘he cried and cried.’ A pervasive syntax in Tutuola’s texts is the application of syncopation; the exemption of conjunctions and even main clauses, whereby the sentence is justified by its contextual force. This, like various works of fiction, places the burden on readers to imbue the syncopation with their imaginative capacities in the framework of the stories.  

MYTH AND THE YORÙBÁ TRADITION

As an intertextual rendition of the oral form of storytelling, Tutuola’s texts cannot be examined without navigating the distinctive mythological and cosmological structures of the Yorùbá tradition. The otherworldly forces (orun) and the world of phenomenal objects such as human, animals and things (aye) coexist in a state of harmony or conflict. According to the sacred text of Ifá, the congruence of individual energies with that of the universe exemplifies harmony under the benevolent powers of the divinities such as Ifá, Ogun (iron divinity), Orisanla (creation divinity) and oku-orun (the ancestors). Destructive and menacing are the otherworldly creatures of terror, spirits, gods and mysterious powers, active and sometimes necessary to be contained. Most importantly is belief in the transitional yet inchoate matrix of death and being—the bridged gulf between life and death catalysed through the psychic re-integration of being, and the potency of consciousness in the animate and inanimate alike. This belief is also categorized as animism—an African metaphysical framework that undergirds many African narratives and serves as a necessary point of reference for critically analysing the works of authors such as Kojo Laing and Wole Soyinka, as well as literary works of magical realism, surrealism and contemporary African speculative fiction. 

Integral to Yorùbá religious traditions is the Orisa worship; a three-fold process of purification, sacrifice and unification. The purification rites include warding off evil, a process whose folkloric narrative essence was originally adapted into writing by Fagunwa in Forest of a Thousand Daemons, and later by Tutuola. In his book, Black Critics and Kings, Andrew Apter describes the purpose of the Orisa worship ritual: ‘The principal task of public ritual is to harness the power which rages in the outside world by transporting it from the surrounding bush into the centre of the town, where it can purify the community.’ 

‘The surrounding bush’ denotes a symbolic area, a metaphysical power that ‘crosses the fundamentals of space, life and experience.’ The bush, revitalized in the works of Tutuola, is a place of ghosts, cowmen, devils, snakes and myriads of wild creatures. The epic hero is to venture into this abyss of the unknown, experiencing an unpredictable miasma of chaotic adventures. In Tutuola’s works, the adventures in the ‘bush of ghosts’ conclude with the return to town, where the narrator recounts their experience. When met with fear, the narrator declares: ‘I told them further that it is in the Bush of Ghosts the “fears”, “sorrows”, “difficulties” all kinds of the “punishments” start and there they end.’ 

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THE METAPHYSICS OF MULTIPLICITY

Born and raised a Christian, sensibilities of Christian moral and didactic models of identity frames Tutuola’s stories and characters. Although traditional beliefs were systematically suppressed during the colonial period, Tutuola never succumbed to disowning the past, even when it was easy, then, to disown the gods. The deficiency of one-dimensionality in Tutuola’s narratives opened a gateway for readers and writers to realize how, as Francis Nyamnjoh argues, ‘impoverishing epistemologies championed by reductionist Cartesian rationalism raised to an ideology could be enriched by complementary traditions of knowledge production initially disqualified and interiorized under colonialism and its metanarratives of conquest.’  

‘I had changed myself into air, they could not trace me again, but I was looking at them.’  

                           —Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard. 

Tutuola’s bushes are realms of possibilities that exude fluidity and malleability, even of conscious forms. In his later works such as Ajaiyi and His Inherited Poverty, Ola Balogun notes Tutuola’s ability to draw readers ‘into a magical world in which events occur exactly as the subconscious mind would represent them in a dream.’ This would be the tapestry for writers such as Ben Okri who revolutionized the concept of dreams in the modern world of African literature. The dreamlike plasticity and metamorphosis of forms projects itself as a lack of fixed ontologies in African epistemology and metaphysics. This reflects in gender epistemology, which, according to Ogundipe-Leslie, are ‘complex’ and ‘socially constructed identities’, echoing the anthropological research of Ifi Amadiume in Male Daughters, Female Husbands and Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí’s The Invention of Women.  

Personhood, according to Tutuola, is a boundless cycle of forms, an enriching multiplicity with gateways of being and becoming. It is a branch with channels of self-capacities that allows remoulding, metamorphosis and bridging through action and reaction. Experience is crucial to this attainment. What Tutuola’s characters encounter in the bush of ghosts is but a balance and counterbalance to their different modes of being. Reality not only extends beyond appearances but also reveals the very nature of existence. It is a self-manifesting permanence of fluidity. Nothing is ever complete, but everything is constantly realizing itself.  

This epic of metamorphosis, journeys and passages into lands unknown echoes what Rosi Braidotti calls ‘a nomadic eco-philosophy of multiple belongings.’ It exemplifies the interrelation of entities—whether inanimate, plant or animal—their interchangeability and the consciousness that inheres in all that exist in a community or environment. The Tutuolean metaphysics of relation and multiplicity—where all things possess different levels of consciousness and a human can metamorphose into air, borrow body parts or mutate into divergent forms—mirrors an African philosophy of mind: panpsychism.  

ENGAGING DEATH

‘I meet my dead cousin in the 10th town of ghosts’ 
                             —Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. 

In Tutuola’s world, death exceeds dichotomous boundaries, where the cessation of life demarcates the dead from the living. One is dead to be alive and perceived in another context. Reality is a frontier of crossroads—death is an adventure. The dead are otherworldly as much as they are humane. Tutuola’s narrators are audacious enough to directly engage death:  

But immediately he heard from me that I had brought Death and when he saw him on my head, he was greatly terrified and raised alarm that he thought nobody could go and bring Death from his house, then he told me to carry him back to his house at once. 

 In this passage in The Palm-wine Drinkard, the narrator captures Death to win a challenge with an old man who assumed Death would kill him if he went to Death’s house. Tutuola denies death the abysmal omnipresence as proposed in Western philosophies with Cartesian binaries—he instead relegates death to the cyclical drama of the metaphysical bridge, the crossroads where the bush of ghosts actualizes the inapprehensible. The gulf of multiple becoming.  

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NAVIGATING THE DEADS TOWN

73 years after the publication of The Palm-Wine Drinkard in 1952, Tutuola is still an embarrassment to some and a source of inspiration to others. The vital influence of the oral tradition in his writing still perspires through memories, sublimating into contemporary art and literature. His submersion in the fabulous has a ripple effect in contemporary magical realism, speculative fiction and Afrofuturism. Tutuola’s literature, drenched in the Yorùbá folklore that evokes the crossroads of Esu-Elegba, serves as a footstool of hybridity—a metaphysical undulation of self-participation in which humans rapport with infinity. It is a space where, as Soyinka posits, ‘man can shelve and even overwhelm metaphysical uncertainties by epic feats, and prolong such a state of social euphoria by their constant recital.’ The most extraordinary of such feats is the journey to the Deads Town.  

The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a unique text that philosophically explores the relationship between metamorphosis and mortality. The changing forms in which we adapt to the epic of life’s dilemma. The self-replicating ways of living and dying which is obscure as it is palpable, strange and electrifying—whereby life and death converges. It includes the non-exhaustive blending, the borrowing of parts, the exchanging of faces, hiring of bodies, the pretensions and mysteries, and the continuous manifestation of death(s) in life. These are phases, rites of passages, crossroads of being and nonbeing.  

In the Dead’s Town, the narrator of The Palm-Wine Drinkard was captured as a slave and this was his experience:  

As I was working with these nine creatures in the farm, one day, one of them abused me with their language which I did not understand, then we started to fight […] When I started to fight him, he began to scrape my body with his sand-paper body and also with small thorns on his palms, so that every part of my body was bleeding. But I tried with all my power to knock him down and I was unable to as I could not grip him firmly with my hands, so he knocked me down and I fainted. Of course, I could not die because we had sold our death away.  

This is an evident metaphor of the colonial experience, where language is weaponized as a tool for destabilization. Of course, Tutuola forays into the domain of the incomprehensible; how does one know abuse in a language they do not understand? This enables readers to recontextualize the situation as it pertains to the violent fact that the narrator was captured as a slave. Language acts as an extension to the vocabulary of oppressive labour. Death persists through the narrative with a fiery intensity. After being brutally injured, the narrator did not die because he and his wife had ‘sold their death away’. This is a philosophical concern for postcolonial theorists such as Achille Mbembe, who investigated the concept of death in the post-colony.  

Mbembe situates the colonial subject into the category of the half-life, ‘a place where life and death are so entangled that it is no longer possible to distinguish them.’ Stuck in a struggle of identities, where language and culture are violently reconstructed by Africa’s colonial history. This complicates the precolonial modes of being into a postcolonial multiplicity directed towards the colonial ‘other’. Tutuola’s exploration of death in his stories are revelatory devices that exceed mere classification of ‘nonsensical’ folklore. They are philosophical gateways for apprehending the metaphysical, historical and political manifestation of existence in Africa. Death in the universe of Tutuola can be recontextualized into our modern realities where death can be manipulated, sold and even lived.  

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THE QUEST CONTINUES

The spirit of the imagination knows too well the flights to the otherworldly, where the unknown exists in either a utopic or dystopic vision, the world unrecognizable yet all too real and too devastating. These symbolic images and narratives not only persist through time, but sublimate into it. They are the sempiternal grounds of being, the cosmic gourd in which we drink. The literature of Tutuola are renditions of the myths and tales passed on through generations and revitalized by a desperate creative mind.  

As a self-taught writer, Tutuola was preoccupied with hoisting the recesses of a mythical past into a pure, undiluted reflection of his imagination—expressed in a language not regulated by convention. This creative freedom mirrors the nomadic quest of his characters. The literary works of Tutuola have traversed the world, echoing the adventures in a forest of mystery. Journeying through the ghostly surge of readers, cantankerous Eurocentric critics—like the palm-wine drinkard—Tutuola’s regeneration subsists in the world of the fantastic and surreal in African literature. With overlapping influence across the arts, music and literature, Tutuola still journeys. He has transited the crossroads of dreams, the bush of ghosts, the self-sustaining myths of our world—and perhaps even the Deads Town. Yet he lives on, because the spirit of the imagination is not bound by time. And death isn’t the end⎈

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