Amos Tutuola’s Unwonted Predicament

Due to his uneasy relationship with literature or, more specifically, colonial-era literature, one always hopes to read something on Tutuola that would further unsettle that already problematic relationship with unanticipated results. Indeed, there was a certain ambivalence in Tutuola’s affair with literature and how he was largely received by professional literary critics. Additionally, in understanding the significance of Tutuola, one naturally expects to encounter criticism that plumbs the conditions and positionalities of the African intellectual within a neoliberal ideological context. Such a project is particularly pertinent in, for instance, the sociocultural conditions of present-day South Africa, which is grappling with ongoing tensions and angst pertaining to decolonization and the recovery of autochthonous intellectual agency.

Another approach to Tutuola could be to discover a way of re-reading him, to return him to Literature with a capital L where he originally belongs; to de-anthropologize him in a manner unforeseen by anthropological discourses so that we can attempt to experience his jagged poetry afresh. In Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd: How Amos Tutuola Can Change our Minds, Francis B. Nyamnjoh has not adopted these suggested approaches. Instead, he often employs Tutuola as the arrowhead of the perennial existential struggle between peripheral beings and knowledges and dominant ones. Of course, one always craves to read Tutuola as a novelist rather than as object of the anthropological gaze. In addition, Nyamnjoh’s work on Tutuola revisits many of the controversies surrounding the novelist and makes a powerful argument for his rehabilitation. Also, in more general terms, Nyamnjoh compels a deeper reflection on the fate of the typical colonial-era artist.

Although Nyamnjoh’s book provides the inspiration for this essay, it is meant to read more as a reflection on the conceptual issues facing a colonial-era literary artist raised in the book. Arguably, Tutuola has not received adequate critical scrutiny perhaps largely due to the often unwarranted prejudices of a conceited academic establishment. Nyamnjoh’s book squarely addresses this lapse while I in turn seek to reflect and highlight it.