Amos Tutuola: the storyteller who opened the door to the land of the dead

Lagos, 1952. A manuscript of around one hundred pages arrives at Faber & Faber, sent by a courier from the Nigerian Ministry of Labour who writes in the evenings on scraps of paper to kill boredom. The editor T.S. Eliot has it read and publishes it. The book is called The Palm-Wine Drinkard — L’Ivrogne dans la brousse. In The Observer, the poet Dylan Thomas salutes “a bustling, cruel and enchanting story” (translated from English). The first Nigerian novel to become world-famous is signed by a man who attended school for only six years.

In brief

Key dates

Interrupted schooling, the blacksmith trade

Amos Olatubosun Tutuola Odegbami is born into a Christian Yoruba family of cocoa farmers; his grandfather, titled egba chief “Odafin”, sat in the traditional administration. At seven years old, his parents place him as a domestic servant with F. O. Monu, who sends him to the Salvation Army school in lieu of a salary. There he discovers One Thousand and One Nights and The Pilgrim’s Progress, read as textbooks, joined by the Yoruba tales of his childhood.

The death of his father in 1939 interrupts everything: he will have, in total, only six years of schooling. He learns the blacksmith trade, practices it for the RAF during the war, sells bread, then becomes a courier at the Ministry of Labour. It is there, he explains, that he begins to write to support waiting for deliveries: “I was still in this distress and poverty when, one night, the idea came to me of writing my first book” (translated from English).

A novel from another world

The Palm-Wine Drinkard recounts the odyssey of a palm-wine drinker whose wine tapper dies: he descends to the land of the dead to bring him back. The story borrows from Yoruba tales their logic — metamorphoses, spirits, cascading trials — in a rough English that many find scandalous at first. The debate is fierce: across the Channel one marvels, in Nigeria several critics denounce a style judged naive that would shame the young nation. He had written as early as 1948 a first story, The Wild Hunter in the Bush of the Ghosts, which would not be published until 1982.

Faber & Faber does not correct the text — a decisive choice that makes its bumps a signature. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) establishes the same ghost-filled bush universe. Followed by Simbi and the Satyr of the Dark Jungle (1955), Feather Woman of the Jungle (1962) and, until 1990, a body of novels and short stories. Tutuola enters the Nigerian radio in Ibadan in 1956, where he works until retirement, and co-founds the Mbari Club, a circle that invented the literary life of independent Nigeria.

Major works

Complete Bibliography

Legacy and Influence

Translated into more than a dozen languages, The Palm-Wine Drinkard owes much to Raymond Queneau, who rendered in 1953 its awkward English into a deliberately quirky French — some suspecting it might be Tutuola himself writing under a pseudonym. His universe overflowed into literature: Brian Eno and David Byrne’s experimental album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts took its title, and the French scene adopted it — Ma vie dans la brousse des fantômes premiered at the Avignon Festival in 1995 with Isaach de Bankolé. Long debated between naive genius and unreadable style, Tutuola is considered a founding father of modern African literature: he proved that an oral storyteller could enter the colonizer’s language without being smoothed over. “When I write, I am always happy” (translated from English), he confided in 1993.

Sources and References

1. “Amos Tutuola | Biography, Books, Articles”, Faber & Faber, https://www.faber.co.uk/author/amos-tutuola/, accessed October 30, 2026.
2. “Obituary: Amos Tutuola”, The Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-amos-tutuola-1256304.html, accessed October 30, 2026.
3. “Amos Tutuola”, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Amos-Tutuola, accessed October 30, 2026.
4. “Amos Tutuola”, Wikipedia (EN), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_Tutuola, accessed October 30, 2026.
5. “Amos Tutuola”, Wikipedia (FR), https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_Tutuola, accessed October 30, 2026.
6. “Amos Tutuola”, EBSCO Research Starters, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/amos-tutuola, accessed October 30, 2026.
7. “Amos Tutuola”, African Studies Centre Leiden, https://www.ascleiden.nl/content/library-weekly/amos-tutuola, accessed October 30, 2026.
8. “What Would Tutuola Do?”, Tate Papers, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/30/what-would-tutuola-do, accessed October 30, 2026.

• Ajaiyi and His Inherited Poverty — Amos Tutuola (1967)
• L'Ivrogne dans la brousse — The Palm-Wine Drinkard (Amos Tutuola)
• La Femme plume — Feather Woman of the Jungle (Amos Tutuola)
• Ma vie dans la brousse des fantômes — My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Amos Tutuola)
• Simbi et le satyre de la jungle noire — Simbi and the Satyr of the Dark Jungle (Amos Tutuola)
• The Brave African Huntress — Amos Tutuola (1958)
• The Village Witch Doctor and Other Stories — Amos Tutuola (1990)
• The Wild Hunter in the Bush of the Ghosts — Amos Tutuola (1982)
• The Witch-Herbalist of the Remote Town — Amos Tutuola (1981)