Amos Tutuola

Amos Tutuola (20 June 1920 – 8 June 1997) was a Nigerian writer who wrote books based in part on Yoruba folk-tales.
Early history.
Amos Tutuola was born Amos Olatubosun Tutuola Odegbami in Wasinmi, a village just a few miles outside of Abeokuta, Nigeria, on June 20, 1920, where his parents Charles Tutuola Odegbami and Esther Aina Odegbami, who were Yoruba Christian cocoa farmers, lived. Wasinmi was a small farming village founded between the years 1845 and 1880 by a group of people of the Egba subethnic group from Abeokuta that included his father and his grandfather.
Amos was the youngest son of his father; his mother was his father's third wife. His grandfather the Odafin of Egbaland, Chief Odegbami (c. 1842-1936), patriarch of the Odegbami clan, was a chieftain of the Egba people and a traditional worshipper of the Yoruba religion. His title, "Odafin" (literally "the establisher of laws" or "lawmaker" in Yoruba), signified that he had an administrative position within the traditional administration of Egbaland, and that he was one of the Iwarefa of the Ogboni.
When Amos was seven years old, in 1927, he became a servant for F. O. Monu, an Igbo man, who sent him to the Salvation Army primary school in lieu of wages. At age 12, he attended the Anglican Central School in Abeokuta. His brief education was limited to six years (from 1934 to 1939). After his grandfather's death in 1936, most members of the chief's family decided to adopt the European style of naming and take his name, Odegbami, as their last name. However, several other family members, including Amos, decided to take their father's name, Tutuola, instead. When his father died in 1939, Tutuola left school to train as a blacksmith, the trade he practised from 1942 to 1945 for the Royal Air Force in Nigeria during WWII. He subsequently tried a number of other vocations, including selling bread and acting as messenger for the Nigerian Department of Labour. In 1946, Tutuola completed his first full-length book, "The Palm-Wine Drinkard", within a few days. In 1947, he married Victoria Alake, with whom he had four sons and four daughters; he would also marry 3 other wives. He is the uncle of the Nigerian footballers Segun Odegbami and Wole Odegbami.
Writing.
Despite his short formal education, Tutuola wrote his novels in English. In 1956, after he had written his first three books and become internationally famous, he joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in Ibadan, Western Nigeria as a storekeeper. Tutuola also became one of the founders of the Mbari Club, the writers' and publishers' organization. In 1979, he held a visiting research fellowship at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) at Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and in 1983 he was an associate of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In retirement he divided his time between residences Ibadan and Ago-Odo.
Tutuola died at the age of 76 on 8 June 1997 from hypertension and diabetes.
Many of his papers, letters, and holographic manuscripts have been collected at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin.
Tutuola's works have been translated into 11 languages, including French, German, Russian, and Polish. Some translators, notably Raymond Queneau (French) and Ernestyna Skurjat (Polish), deliberately adjusted the grammar and syntax of the translations, to reflect the occasionally atypical language of Tutuola's original prose.
"The Palm Wine Drinkard".
Tutuola's most famous novel, "The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town", was written in 1946, first published in 1952 in London by Faber and Faber, then translated and published in Paris as "L'Ivrogne dans la brousse" by Raymond Queneau in 1953. Poet Dylan Thomas brought it to wide attention, calling it "brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching". Although the book was praised in England and the United States, it faced severe criticism in Tutuola's native Nigeria. Part of this criticism was due to his use of "broken English" and primitive style, which supposedly promoted the Western stereotype of "African backwardness". This line of criticism has, however, lost steam. In the opinion of Taban Lo Liyong:
Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie in her own reassessment wrote in "The Journal of Commonwealth Studies":
O. R. Dathorne additionally said:
J. P. Sartre, contrasting poetry in French by Frenchmen and Africans, declared:
Wole Soyinka wrote in 1963:
"The Palm-Wine Drinkard" was followed up by "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" in 1954 and then several other books in which Tutuola continued to explore Yoruba traditions and folklore. Strangely, the narrative of "The Palm-Wine Drinkard" refers back to "The Bush of Ghosts" several times, even though the latter was written and published later. However, none of the subsequent works managed to match the success of "The Palm Wine Drinkard".
Tributes.
One of the characters of the television show "" is named Odafin Tutuola. In the first pages of the introduction of "The Palm Wine Drinkard", Michael Thelwell writes that Amos Tutuola's grandfather was a Odafin, the spiritual leader of a clan, while Tutuola was the given name of Amos's father.
Brian Eno and David Byrne took the title of the novel "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" for their 1981 album.
One of the characters of the gamebook "The Race Forever", from the Choose Your Own Adventure collection, is named after Amos Tutuola.
In 2015, the Society of Young Nigerian Writers, under the leadership of Wole Adedoyin, founded the Amos Tutuola Literary Society, aimed at promoting and reading the works of Amos Tutuola.
The video game "", which takes place in the 17th-century Caribbean archipelago, includes a side storyline concerning a self-liberated and self-governing clan of African Maroons, whose spiritual guide and medicine man is named Tutuola. Writer Jaromir Król confirmed that the name was a deliberate homage to Amos Tutuola; he considered the Nigerian author's stories astonishing and unforgettable since he had first read them at age 6, and felt that the thoughtful, philosophical and noble character was worthy of being given Amos Tutuola's name.