E3W Literature | University of Texas

Amos Tutuola Collection
Bernth Lindfors Collection of Amos Tutuola
Robert M. Wren Africa Papers
The Harry Ransom Center
The University of Texas at Austin

Reviewed by Gabriela Redwine

Amos Tutuola, born in 1920 in Abeokuta, Nigeria, wrote some of the first known works of Anglophone Nigerian literature. Tutuola’s parents were cocoa and palm tree farmers who sent him to work as a servant when he was young. His employer paid him with schooling, and in this way Tutuola received about six years of formal education, which ended around 1938 when his father died. In 1942 he joined the Royal Air Force as a coppersmith. He wrote his first book, The Wild Hunter in the Bush of the Ghosts, in 1948 while working as a messenger in the Labour Department in Lagos, and began writing The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads’ Town (1952), his earliest published book and the work for which he is best known, not long afterwards.

Tutuola’s subsequent books, though not as successful as Palm-Wine Drinkard, did much to preserve and further knowledge of Yoruba folktales and develop an Anglophone Nigerian literary tradition. He was appointed writer-in-residence at the University of Ife in 1979 and also received several honorary fellowships, including one from the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Tutuola moved to Ibadan, Nigeria, in the late 1950s and continued to write while working for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation as a storekeeper. He died in 1997, and his work continues to be the focus of much critical study.

Tutuola’s life and writing are well represented in the Ransom Center’s collections. The bulk of the Amos Tutuola Collection consists of manuscript drafts in English and Yoruba, personal and literary correspondence, materials related to Bernth Lindfors’s Critical Perspectives on Amos Tutuola (1975), and personal papers. The collection includes the handwritten original manuscript of Palm-Wine Drinkard, as well as later versions; handwritten and typed drafts of Pauper, Brawler, and Slanderer (1987); the handwritten manuscript of Tutuola’s play The Sword of Vengeance (1982); handwritten (photocopies) and typed versions of Wild Hunter; short stories; and other works.

In addition to the Tutuola Collection, two other holdings contain materials important to any critical understanding of his literary output: the Bernth Lindfors Collection of Amos Tutuola (BL) and the Robert M. Wren Africa Papers. Bernth Lindfors is an emeritus professor of African and English literature at the University of Texas; Robert Wren was an Africanist and English professor at the University of Houston until his sudden death in 1989. Both were instrumental in bringing Tutuola’s papers to the Ransom Center and advocating for the importance of his literature. The Tutuola materials in these two collections include Robert Wren’s 1982 diary entries describing his visits with Tutuola in Nigeria; correspondence, photos, and clippings related to Tutuola’s 1983 visit to the University of Texas; versions of The Wild Hunter in the Bush of the Ghosts and other stories; correspondence with and writings about Tutuola; correspondence related to the Ransom Center’s acquisition of Tutuola’s original Palm-Wine Drinkard manuscript and other materials; photocopies of Faber & Faber’s files on Tutuola (1951-1967); and other assorted materials related to Tutuola’s literary career.

One of the most significant items represented in these materials is The Wild Hunter in the Bush of the Ghosts, a work Lindfors described in his introduction to the 1982 facsimile edition as the “first long piece of prose fiction written for publication in English by a Nigerian author.” In 1948 Tutuola sent this seventy-seven-page, handwritten narrative, purportedly illustrated with photographs of ghosts, to Focal Press, a publisher of books on photography. Tutuola had hired a local boy to draw pictures of the ghosts described in the story, and then took photographs of the boy’s sketches and included those as the book’s illustrations. Photocopies of these photographs exist in the Lindfors Collection of Amos Tutuola (box 1, folder 9). Even though the story and accompanying images were not suitable for Focal, the publisher bought them for a small sum to support Tutuola’s creative efforts and then shelved the manuscript. A different publisher, Faber & Faber, bought and issued Tutuola’s next book, Palm-Wine Drinkard, and his earlier work was forgotten.

When the manuscript of Palm-Wine Drinkard—a fantastic and gory narrative scrawled in idiosyncratic English—arrived at the Faber offices in 1951, it was unlike anything they had ever received. The letters Tutuola exchanged with Faber and other publishers over the years offer fascinating insight into perceptions of the novelty of Tutuola’s narrative voice and his position as a black African writer. “We should know that a story is finished,” wrote one unidentified representative of Grove Press. “The story should have a beginning, middle, and end.” He continued: “Also they (your stories) are sometimes too complicated. You start one story and then bring in another story, and the reader gets confused about what happened to the first story. Other than that they are very good. Your language is wonderful —.” The correspondence files show that representatives from different publishing companies sent Tutuola reading material, and that Tutuola wrote to the East African Literature Bureau to inquire about the prices of several books by East African authors. These and other items illustrate the fine line the publishers found themselves walking—quite self-consciously—as they provided Tutuola with books and suggestions for making his narratives more conventional, while at the same time selling his stories in a market that valued their “uncorrupted innocence” and “primitivism”—phrases used in British and American reviews of Palm-Wine Drinkard.

While conducting research in Fabers’ Tutuola files in April 1975, Lindfors noticed a reference to a manuscript called The Wild Hunter in the Bush of the Ghosts. The title was similar to that of Tutuola’s second published book, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), yet different enough to pique Lindfors’s interest. Over a year later Focal Press located the manuscript, and in March 1978 Lindfors was finally able to examine it. As he skimmed the fragile pages, he realized that the unpublished manuscript in his hands represented the “missing link in Nigeria’s cultural evolution” from a Yoruba oral storytelling tradition to an Anglophone written one. “Here indeed,” he wrote in his postscript to the 1982 facsimile edition, “was the genesis of contemporary Nigerian literature in English.”

The Amos Tutuola Collection contains five folders of correspondence from Faber, and at least one letter, dated 1953, mentions the original Wild Hunter manuscript. In addition, the Lindfors collection includes photocopies of Fabers’ complete Tutuola files from 1951 to 1967, which consist of correspondence regarding Wild Hunter, Palm-Wine Drinkard and some of Tutuola’s later works, as well as autobiographical statements about his early life and the composition of Palm-Wine Drinkard. These materials are especially significant because Faber has since restricted outside access to their archives. Versions of Lindfors’s introduction and postscript to the 1982 edition of Wild Hunter, in which he tells the story of the rediscovered manuscript and the controversy surrounding his attempts to convince the Ransom Center to purchase it from Tutuola, reside in both the Tutuola Collection and the Lindfors Collection of Tutuola.

Robert Wren first met Tutuola in 1982 when he returned the original Wild Hunter manuscript to him in Ibadan. In his diaries he recounted his conversations with the author. When Wren asked about Wild Hunter, Tutuola replied that it had been “inspired by Fagunwa’s Ogboju Ode ninu Igbo Irunmale [1938],” the first full-length novel published in Yoruba. “[Tutuola] wanted to do something in English, as Fagunwa had done in Yoruba,” Wren wrote. In the late 1980s Wren became involved in trying to find a buyer for the original manuscripts of Wild Hunter and Palm-Wine Drinkard, an endeavor well documented in the correspondence section of the Amos Tutuola subseries in the Wren Collection. Although the Ransom Center does not have the original Wild Hunter manuscript, the Wren and Tutuola collections contain handwritten and typed versions of it, including a photocopy of the original. All three collections provide substantial documentation regarding the provenance and publication history of the original holograph.

As Lindfors’s rediscovery of the unpublished manuscript of Wild Hunter attests, any archive has the potential to unsettle. I discovered many small discrepancies in Tutuola’s papers, but the most intriguing by far appeared at the end of his 1983 essay, “A Brief Explanation of My Journey to America and London,” written when he was in his early sixties. “‘The Palm-Wine Drinkard’ was first written in the Yoruba language,” Tutuola explained in the essay. He sent the manuscript to The Literature Committee in Ibadan and heard nothing for a year. “When my manuscript was returned to me,” Tutuola continued, “then I translated it into the English language. After, I kept it safe, because I did not know to where to send it.” Tutuola is regarded by many as the founding father of the Anglophone Nigerian novel and Palm-Wine Drinkard as one of the first books in that tradition. Would the book be more or less authentic if it had been written in Yoruba and translated into English rather than the other way around? How might the story of Tutuola’s stories have become as much a part of the Anglophone tradition as the literature itself? Regardless of whether Tutuola’s memory is accurate, his statement invites a reconsideration of what is at stake.

The Tutuola materials in these three archival collections hold great significance for the further study of his writing, Yoruba language and culture, the fraught acquisition of African literary and cultural artifacts by western archives, the publication history of Anglophone African writers, and the historical and cultural significance of the Anglophone literary tradition in Nigeria.