The Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola (1920-1997) is famous for his fantastic tales which, in their content, depend heavily on the folklore of his ancestral Yoruba people. Amos Tutuola was born in Abeokuta (Yorubaland). His father's death in 1939 prevented...

Amos Tutuola is one of the great eccentrics in African literature. Born to Charles (a cocoa farmer) and Esther Aina Tutuola in Abeokuta, Western Nigeria, in 1920, educated no more than six years in missionary primary schools, trained as a coppersmith...

Amos Tutuola was not the first African novelist in the English language - according to how you define a novel, that honour probably belongs to a Gold Coast writer called R.E. Obeng for Eighteenpence (1941) - but he was certainly the first to attract...

Ato Quayson, (Oxford: James Currey & Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), x, 192 pp. Cloth $39.95, paper $17.95. With this book, Quayson joins in the debate over the problematic issue of paradigms, evolution and originality in African literatures, a topic many critics...

[Tutuola] is the most moralistic of all Nigerian writers…. [He] has his two feet firmly planted in the hard soil of an ancient oral and moral tradition. Of course Tutuola's art conceals—or rather clothes—his purpose, as good art often does. But anybody who asks what the story is about can hardly have read him. And I suspect that many people who talk about Tutuola one way or another have not read him.

In order to establish [Tutuola's] position in African literature and to estimate him properly, it is essential to be clear about the genre in which he wrote. It has been too facilely assumed, particularly in the western world, that he wrote novels. Yet, however flexible we may be in our definition of the novel or in the choice of criteria for its evaluation, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to find a definition or set of criteria which will enable us to describe the works of Tutuola as novels...

Amos Tutuola's strangely poetic writing was quick to gain recognition in England and America, but in his own country it was at first widely criticised because of its bizarre use of English and because Tutuola was dealing with a past which many people were trying to forget, a past associated with the old gods and the spirits of forest and village, an ancestral past whose traditions for many of the present generation had lost their powers of reassurance while still retaining some powers of fear and thr...