Amos Tutuola

Amos Tutuola was born in June 1920 at Wasimi, on the outskirts of Abeokuta in the Egba district of south-western Nigeria, the son of Charles Tutuola — a cocoa farmer of the Egba Yoruba — and Esther Aina. He was the only son of his parents and was raised in the Anglican mission Christianity of the Abeokuta Egba mission station.

He was placed at seven at the Salvation Army primary school at Abeokuta and completed only the first six years of formal schooling. He left school at thirteen at his father’s death in 1933 and took up the family cocoa farm. He moved at fourteen in 1934 to the household of his elder half-brother at Lagos and apprenticed as a coppersmith — the trade he practised intermittently through the remainder of his life.

He served the Royal Air Force at Lagos as a coppersmith between 1942 and 1945 — fabricating sheet-metal aircraft components at the RAF Lagos station — and read in spare hours the Yoruba folk-tale collections of Daniel Olorunfemi Fagunwa, then in active publication in Lagos under the supervision of Chief Obafemi Awolowo.

He wrote in three days at Lagos in 1946 the manuscript of The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead’s Town — a novel composed in the demotic Yoruba-inflected English of the Lagos coppersmith yards on a Yoruba folkloric premise. He sent the manuscript to the Faber and Faber editorial office in London, where T.S. Eliot — then poetry editor at Faber — read it and approved its publication. The Palm-Wine Drinkard was published at London on the second of May 1952 — the first work in English by a sub-Saharan African writer published by a major London publisher.

The novel was reviewed by Dylan Thomas in The Observer in July 1952 with the famous notice that it was a ‘brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching story’ — a review that secured the novel a small but durable European readership.

He published six further novels in the same Yoruba-English voice — among them My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) and Simbi and the Satyr of the Dark Jungle (1955) — and worked as a storekeeper at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation at Ibadan from 1957 until retirement in 1976.

He died at Ibadan on the eighth of June 1997 of complications of diabetes and hypertension, at seventy-six.

He is honored here as the author of The Palm-Wine Drinkard.