The Novel That Made Pidgin Literature

Imagine picking up a novel and finding sentences like this: “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.” The grammar is unconventional, the phrasing direct and rhythmic. This is the voice of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard, a book that landed like a linguistic meteorite in the literary world of 1952. Published in London and celebrated by Western critics, it was met with embarrassment and scorn by many educated elites in Tutuola’s native Nigeria.

They saw its “broken” English as a national disgrace. Yet, in retrospect, Tutuola’s groundbreaking work did something revolutionary: it cracked open the door for non-standard Englishes, including Pidgin and Creole, to be taken seriously as literary languages. This is the story of the novel that accidentally started a revolution.

Who Was the “Drinkard”?

To understand the novel, you must first understand the man. Amos Tutuola was not a product of the university system, unlike many of his Nigerian literary contemporaries like Chinua Achebe or Wole Soyinka. He was a coppersmith, a government messenger, and a storekeeper with only a primary school education. His English was learned, not formally perfected. His literary influences were not Shakespeare and Dickens, but the rich, ancient well of Yoruba oral tradition and folklore he grew up with.

The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads’ Town tells the story of an unnamed narrator, a man whose entire existence revolves around consuming gallons of palm-wine. When his expert palm-wine tapster falls from a tree and dies, the narrator’s supply is cut off. Consumed by grief and thirst, he embarks on an epic quest into the spirit world to find his deceased tapster. His journey is a surreal odyssey through a landscape populated by terrifying and wondrous beings drawn directly from Yoruba mythology: talking skulls, shape-shifting “incomplete gentlemen”, and entire towns of ghosts and spirits.

The Language of a New World

The controversy surrounding the book wasn’t about its plot, but its language. Tutuola wrote in a style that was uniquely his own. It wasn’t quite Nigerian Pidgin, but rather a form of English that was filtered through a Yoruba consciousness. Its vocabulary was English, but its rhythm, syntax, and idioms were deeply rooted in the Yoruba language.

Consider these features:

• Direct Translation: Many phrases feel like literal, word-for-word translations from Yoruba. For example, “When it was the 6th month that I had left my home town, I reached a certain town and I stopped in it.” The structure mirrors Yoruba sentence construction, not standard English.
• Repetition and Cadence: The prose has the repetitive, rhythmic quality of an oral tale told around a fire. “My father got eight children and I was the eldest among them, all of the rest were girls, and I was a boy.” The redundancy isn’t poor writing; it’s a feature of oral storytelling for emphasis and clarity.
• Unconventional Grammar and Vocabulary: Tutuola’s English bypasses standard grammatical rules. He creates neologisms like “drinkard” (instead of drunkard) and uses words in fresh, unexpected ways. This wasn’t a mistake; it was an act of linguistic moulding, shaping English to fit the story he wanted to tell.

As the narrator explains his quest, he says his listeners “were very much surprised and said that they had never heard of such a person who was going to the Deads’ Town to look for his dead person.” The phrasing is strange, but it has a powerful, incantatory magic that conventional English prose might have smoothed away.

A Tale of Two Receptions

The reaction to _The Palm-Wine Drinkard_ created a stark divide between Western and Nigerian critics.

In Europe and America, the book was hailed as a work of genius. Poet Dylan Thomas famously described it as a “brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching story.” Western critics, tired of polished modernism, saw Tutuola’s work as “primitive”, “authentic”, and “surreal”—a raw, unfiltered voice from the heart of Africa. While this praise often carried condescending, colonial undertones of the “noble savage” archetype, it nonetheless catapulted Tutuola to international fame.

Back home, the reaction was largely hostile. At the time, Nigeria was on the path to independence from Britain. The educated Nigerian elite was determined to prove to the world—and to themselves—that they were the intellectual equals of their colonizers. Mastery of the Queen’s English was a key symbol of this capability.

In this context, Tutuola’s book was seen as a profound embarrassment. His non-standard English seemed to confirm the worst colonial stereotypes of Africans as uneducated and unsophisticated. Critics accused him of setting back the cause of Nigerian literature and making a mockery of his people. They felt his book was not a representation of Nigerian creativity, but a caricature of Nigerian ignorance.

The Unintentional Pioneer

So how did a novel scorned for its “bad” English become a foundational text for pidgin literature? Tutuola’s bravery—whether intentional or not—was in his complete disregard for prescriptive linguistic rules. He proved that a powerful story could be told in a voice that was neither the Queen’s English nor a traditional African language, but something new in between.

He broke a psychological barrier. Before Tutuola, the idea of writing a serious novel in anything other than “proper” English was almost unthinkable for an African writer seeking international publication. After Tutuola, the possibilities expanded. He had demonstrated that the language of the colonizer could be captured, dismantled, and reassembled to serve a new master: the African storyteller.

This act of linguistic appropriation paved the way for writers who would later use Nigerian Pidgin with more deliberate political and artistic intent. Most notably, Ken Saro-Wiwa, in his 1985 novel Sozaboy, wrote in a mix of pidgin and standard English he called “rotten English.” Saro-Wiwa was making a conscious choice to represent the voice of his protagonist, an uneducated boy soldier, authentically. He owed a clear debt to the path Tutuola had blazed three decades earlier.

Even Chinua Achebe, a master of standard English, became one of Tutuola’s staunchest defenders. While Achebe chose a different path—infusing his standard English prose with Igbo proverbs and speech patterns—he recognized the power and validity of what Tutuola had done. He argued that Tutuola’s language was a “new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings.”

A Legacy Written in “Broken” English

Today, The Palm-Wine Drinkard is rightfully seen as a classic of African and world literature. Its initial controversy highlights the complex relationship between language, power, and identity in a post-colonial world. The novel forced a critical question: Whose language is it, anyway? And who decides what is “correct”?

Amos Tutuola provided a stunning answer. By writing in his own unique, Yoruba-inflected English, he performed a powerful act of linguistic liberation. He wasn’t just a storyteller; he was a language-maker, showing generations of writers to come that the most powerful voice is, and always will be, your own.