We are reminded [in Ajaiyi and His Inherited Poverty] of Bunyan and of the Harrowing of Hell. Part of the delightfulness of [Tutuola's] work stems from the beauty of a working-class man asserting himself, his own instinctive taste operating on scraps of the colonizers' literature and on old African tales and proverbs, criticizing and blending his sources into a unity. Always the voice is that of a man with little schooling who talks marvellously.

In spite of his gaiety, Tutuola is as serious here as he was in his tale of the town of multi-coloured people who persecuted the mono-coloured in the Bush of Ghosts. His hero, Ajaiyi, has inherited poverty from his crippled parents and it has grown around him like a tortoise shell….

The story ends on an exalted note, with Ajaiyi living in some kind of Christian communism. "It was like that I was entirely...