There is a great amount of misunderstanding involved in the reputation that Tutuola has enjoyed outside Nigeria, and especially in Western countries. It was thought that he had created a new form of expression, a new kind of novel, whereas in fact …, he merely took over a form developed out of the folk tradition to a new level of expressiveness by Fagunwa. It was even imagined that the universe of his narratives bore some kind of relationships to that which the surrealists, each in his own way, sought to evoke from the subliminal reaches of the individual consciousness. His limitations with regard to the English language in which he expressed his works were also valorized…. In short, Tutuola has been admired for his 'quaintness', for the apparent ingenuousness of his style and of the content of his novels.

Now, quaintness, as such, is not and cannot be a...