Title: The Palm-Wine Drinkard Author: Amos Tutuola Creation Date: 1952 Location: Nigeria
Summary
The Palm-Wine Drinkard tells the story of an unnamed narrator, a man so devoted to drinking palm wine that his father engaged a full-time tapster to keep him supplied. When the tapster dies, the Drinkard sets out on a journey to the Town of the Deads to bring him back. What follows is a hallucinatory odyssey through Yoruba spirit-world geography, encountering shape-shifting creatures, a skull who hires the body parts that make him a complete gentleman and returns them one by one, a child who bursts from his wife's swollen thumb and talks the moment he emerges, a half-bodied baby who rises out of the ashes of a burnt house, cities of spirits, and terrors that defy Western categories of reality. The Drinkard survives through cunning, juju (spiritual power), and sheer persistence. He finds his tapster but cannot bring him back; instead, he returns with an egg that can produce food but also, when misused, brings destruction.
The novel reads like no other work in English literature. It is simultaneously a retelling of Yoruba oral narrative traditions and an entirely original literary creation, written in a sui generis English that bends the language to accommodate a Yoruba worldview.
Why This Book Matters
The Palm-Wine Drinkard was one of the earliest Nigerian novels to gain major international publication and attention, appearing six years before Things Fall Apart. Its importance is twofold. First, it brought Yoruba oral narrative traditions -- the vast body of stories about the spirit world, transformation, and the relationship between the living and the dead -- into the global literary mainstream. Second, Tutuola's English, which does not conform to standard grammar or syntax, posed a radical question about literary language: who owns English, and what happens when an African storyteller reshapes it to carry an African cosmology?
The novel was championed by Dylan Thomas, who praised its "young English" as alive in ways that conventional prose was not. It sparked fierce debate in Nigeria, where some critics considered Tutuola's non-standard English an embarrassment, while others recognised it as a revolutionary literary act. That debate itself illuminated the fraught politics of language, education, and cultural authority in colonial and postcolonial Africa.
Historical Context
Tutuola wrote The Palm-Wine Drinkard in 1946-1948, working as a messenger in the Labour Department in Lagos. He had only a primary school education and wrote in the English available to him, infused with the storytelling patterns of Yoruba oral tradition. Nigeria in the late 1940s was a colony in ferment, with nationalist movements gaining momentum toward the independence that would come in 1960. Tutuola was not a university-educated intellectual like many of his contemporaries; his work emerged much more directly from living oral tradition than the formally schooled literary culture that would shape many later Nigerian writers.
Literary Significance
Tutuola's prose style is one of the most distinctive in twentieth-century literature. Sentences accumulate through repetition and accretion rather than subordination, mirroring the structure of oral narration. The narrative moves by the logic of the spirit world rather than the logic of realism, producing a form of prose later readers often compare to magical realism, though it arises from a very different cosmological tradition. The novel's influence extends to Ben Okri (The Famished Road), Wole Soyinka, and beyond into the global tradition of literary fantasy. It remains a touchstone for debates about language, authenticity, and the relationship between oral and written traditions.
Research Notes
The original Faber and Faber edition (1952) is the standard text. Tutuola's other novels, particularly My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), extend the same narrative world. Critical reception has swung dramatically over the decades, from initial Western enthusiasm to Nigerian criticism and back to broad acclaim. Bernth Lindfors and other scholars have produced extensive critical studies. The novel is essential for this collection as a demonstration that African oral cosmology can generate written literature of genuine originality.
The Reading
I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life. In those days we did not know other money except cowries, so that everything was very cheap, and my father was the richest man in our town. He engaged an expert tapster for me and gave me a farm which contained 560,000 palm-trees. This tapster tapped one hundred and fifty kegs every morning and another seventy-five in the evening, and I drank the whole of it, so my friends were uncountable. But one Sunday evening the tapster climbed one of the tallest trees, and as he was tapping on, he fell down unexpectedly and died at the foot of it. The first thing that I did when I found him was to climb another palm-tree near that spot and drink to my satisfaction, and then I dug a pit and buried him there. By the third day my friends did not come to my house again. Then I remembered that old people were saying that the whole people who had died in this world did not go to heaven directly but were living in one place somewhere in this world, so I took my juju and my father's juju and left to find out whereabouts my tapster was.
After the seventh month I came to an old man who was not a really man, he was a god. I told him that my name was 'Father of gods who could do everything in this world'. So he gave me a net and told me to bring Death from his house before he would tell me whereabouts my tapster was, because he was hoping that Death would kill me there, as nobody could reach Death's house and return. I found Death in his yam garden, using the bones of the human-beings he had killed as fuel woods and their skull heads as basins. Then I dug a pit of his size in the road and spread the net over it, and asked him to lead me a short distance on my way home, and when he had led me to that place I told him to sit down, and he fell in, and I rolled him up and put him on my head. I threw Death down before the old man's door, and the net cut into pieces and Death found his way out, and the old man and the whole town ran for their lives, and since that day Death has no permanent place to dwell, and we are hearing his name about in the world. But the old man could not fulfil his promise, so I left that town without knowing where my tapster was.
In the fifth month I reached a town whose head received me into his house and said that he knew where my tapster was, but that I must first find his daughter, who was captured from the market by a curious creature. One market-day she saw a complete gentleman there, all the parts of his body completed, and if he had been an article for sale he would be sold at least for two thousand pounds. She left her articles unsold and followed him, and he told her to go back, but she did not listen. After twelve miles they branched into an endless forest, and there he began to return the hired parts of his body to the owners and pay them the rentage money, until he was crawling on the ground. The lady wanted to go back, but he said thus: "I had told you not to follow me before we branched into this endless forest which belongs to only terrible and curious creatures, but when I became a half-bodied incomplete gentleman you wanted to go back, now that cannot be done, you have failed. Even you have never seen anything yet, just follow me." Then he returned the belly and the ribs and the arms and the neck, and last the skin and flesh which covered the head, and he was reduced to a Skull. He took her to a hole under the ground in which only Skulls were living, and tied a single cowrie on her neck which made her dumb at that same moment, gave her a large frog on which she sat as a stool, and gave a whistle to another Skull to keep watch on her.
On a later market-day the same gentleman came to the market again, and when he was returning I used one of my juju and followed him into the forest as a lizard. Inside the hole I changed myself to a man as before, and when I took the lady from the frog the cowrie on her neck began to shout so that a person four miles away would hear it, and the Skull who was watching her heard the noise and blew his whistle to the rest of them. The Skulls chased us, rolling on the ground like large stones and humming, so I changed her to a kitten and put her in my pocket and changed myself to a very small bird which I could describe as a sparrow in English language, and flew away to her father's house, where I changed her to a lady as she was before and myself to a man as well. She could not talk or eat, so I went back to the forest, and there I saw the very Skull whom the lady had followed from the market, and heard him say that one leaf would make her talk again and a second would loose the cowrie away for ever, and luckily I saw where he threw them both. I cooked them separately, and when she ate the first she began to talk at once, and when she ate the second the cowrie loosened away by itself. So her father and mother brought fifty kegs of palm-wine for me and gave me the lady as wife and two rooms in that house. That was how I got a wife.
I spent three and a half years in that town, tapping palm-wine for myself at a farm there, and then the left hand thumb of my wife began to swell out as if it was a buoy, but it did not pain her, and one day when she followed me to the farm the thumb touched a palm-tree thorn and burst out suddenly, and a male child came out of it and began to talk to us as if he was ten years of age. He told us that his name was ZURRJIR, which means a son who would change himself into another thing very soon, and all the while that he was talking he was drinking the palm-wine which I had tapped, and before five minutes he had drunk three kegs out of four. He became our ruler in the house, and he went round the town and burnt the houses of the heads of that town to ashes, so one night when he slept inside the room I put oil around the house and lighted it, and he burnt together with the house to ashes. After that I pressed my wife's father until he told me where my tapster was.
We had travelled two miles when my wife went back for a gold trinket she had forgotten in the burnt house, and I followed her, and when she scratched the ashes with a stick the middle of them rose up suddenly and there appeared a half-bodied baby, and he was talking with a lower voice like a telephone. He told her to take him along with us, and when we did not stop he commanded that our eyes should be blinded and that we should stop breathing, and truly speaking we could not breathe. So we came back and took him, and as he was on my wife's head he was whistling as if he was forty persons, and every village drove us out, and when my wife tired I carried him myself. Ah, how could we escape from this half-bodied baby? But God is so good, and as we were carrying him to and fro in the bush that night we heard as if they were playing music somewhere. There we saw the creatures that we called Drum, Song and Dance, and the half-bodied baby came down from my head and joined them. When Drum started to beat himself it was just as if he was beaten by fifty men, and nobody who heard these three fellows would not follow them wherever they were going. So we danced after them for five days without stopping once, until they entered a premises built with mud with our half-bodied baby, and we saw them no more. Then we reached the town my wife's father had named, but they told us that my tapster had left it two years before and was living with deads at the Deads' Town.
Then we found a road so clean that a foot mark could not be traced on it, and when we wanted to branch off it we could not branch, or stop, or go back, and it carried us through a large gate into the Unreturnable-Heaven's Town, where creatures that we had never seen in our life held us firmly and took us to their king. Their king said that his was a town in which are only enemies of God living, and he commanded his attendants to clear all the hair from our heads. They cleared it with flat stones and then with pieces of broken bottle, and rubbed our heads with ground pepper. After that they dug two holes in the full heat of the sun and put us in them to the jaw, with food near our mouths which we were unable to touch. But God is so good, a heavy rain came before they could come back to us, and when it was one o'clock in the night the holes became soft, and I got out and pulled my wife out of hers. But the gate of the town was closed and a thick wall went all round it, so we hid under a bush near the wall, and when the day broke they searched the field for us. When it was about two o'clock in the mid-night, and the whole of them slept, we lighted their houses with their own fire, and before they could wake up all the houses had burnt into ashes and about ninety per cent of them burnt with the houses, and the rest stole away that night.
As we travelled along the bank of a large river we saw a tree which was almost white as if it was painted every day with white paint, and somebody peeped out of it and was focusing us as a photographer focuses somebody. Two large hands stretched from the tree without end and picked both of us off the ground and drew us through a large door into the tree. But before we entered we sold our death to somebody at the door for seventy pounds, eighteen shillings and sixpence, and lent our fear to another on monthly interest, so that we did not care about death and did not fear again. Inside was a big and beautiful town, and the hands, whose name was Faithful-Hands, directed us to an old woman whose name was Faithful-Mother, and she told us that she only helped those in difficulties and killed nobody. She took us to her dancing hall, where all the lights were in technicolours, and to her hospital, where our heads brought out full-grown hair within a week. We did not like to leave there ever, but after a year and two weeks she told us that she had no right to delay anybody longer. So we found ourselves at the foot of the tree in the bush again and said suddenly, "We are in the bush again"; and we took our fear back from the borrower, but the one who bought our death could not return it, because he had paid for it.
Then we travelled to the Deads' Town, and when we looked at it from forty miles away it seemed to be running away from us. When we asked for my tapster, whose name was Baity before he died, one of the deads told us to go back, because it was forbidden for alives to come there, but when I begged him he showed us a house. As we were going to that house the whole of them that stood there grew annoyed to see us walking forward, because nobody walked forward there at all, so we walked backward. But I stumbled and was bleeding, and when that dead man saw the blood he dragged us out of the town by force, because the deads did not like to see blood. My tapster came out to us, and he thought that I had died, so he gave the sign of deads, and we were unable to reply. He told me that after he died he spent two years in training before he could qualify as a full dead man, and that he could not say what happened to him before he died. So I told him that he fell from a palm-tree on a Sunday evening, and he said that if that should be the case, he overdrank on that day. He could not follow me back to my town, because a dead man could not live with alives. But he gave me an egg, and told me to keep it as safely as gold, and to put it in a bowl of water and mention the name of anything that I wanted.
We reached my town at seven o'clock in the morning, and I opened my box and hid the egg. So all our trials and difficulties and many years' travel brought only an egg. But before I reached my town there was a great famine, and it killed millions of the old people and uncountable adults and children, and every plant and river dried away for lack of the rain. The cause of it was this. In the olden days both Land and Heaven were tight friends, as they were once human-beings, and one day they went to hunt together, and hunted from morning till five o'clock and killed nothing, and later in a forest they found one mouse. It was too small to divide into two, and these two friends were also greedy, so Land said that he would take it away and Heaven said the same, and each said that he was senior to the other, and when they had argued both were vexed and left the mouse there, but when Heaven reached the heaven he stopped rain falling to the earth, and he did not send dew to the earth at all.
As there was a great famine, I went to my room and put water into a bowl and put the egg inside it and commanded it, and before a second the room was full of varieties of food and drinks, and we ate to our satisfaction and I sent for my old friends and gave them the rest, and they said that for six years they had never tasted water or palm-wine at all. The news of the wonderful egg was spreading from town to town, and before long my town could not contain strangers. They would not return to their towns again, so that I got no chance to sleep, except to command the egg day and night, so I put it together with the bowl outside in the middle of these people. Then one day, when they had eaten to their satisfaction, they began to play and wrestle with each other until the egg was mistakenly smashed and broken into two. I gummed it, but when I commanded it three times in their presence nothing was produced, and after four days they returned to their towns one by one, abusing me as they were leaving.
But the famine was still going on seriously, and when I saw that many old people began to die every day, I called the rest of the old people who remained and we made a sacrifice of two fowls, six kolas, one bottle of palm oil and six bitter kolas in a broken pot, to be carried to Heaven in heaven. We chose one of the slaves of the king of our town, and he took it to Heaven, who was senior to Land, and Heaven received it with gladness, and it meant that Land surrendered. But before that slave could reach halfway back to the earth a heavy rain came, and nobody in the town would allow him to enter his or her house, because they were thinking that he would carry them to Heaven as he had carried the sacrifice. And when the rain had been falling regularly for three months, there was no famine again.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
The original Faber and Faber edition (1952) remains in print. The Grove Press edition, now with an introduction by Wole Soyinka, is the most widely available version. Tutuola also wrote My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), which extends the same spirit-world geography and is available in a combined volume.
By Amos Tutuola. The Grove Press combined volume with My Life in the Bush of Ghosts — the most comprehensive way to encounter Tutuola's spirit-world universe.
By Amos Tutuola. The Faber & Faber edition — the original publisher who brought Tutuola to the world in 1952.
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