Anyone who enjoys Nigerian writing in English must salute Amos Tutuola, the man who made the breakthrough in 1952 with The Palm-Wine Drinkard. It is appropriate that the founder of a literature should be a working-class man, an early school-leaver, making poetic use of the idioms of the unlettered. Tutuola was like a seventeenth-century Welshman who had just discovered the sweetness of the English tongue. The Witch-Herbalist of the Remote Town is his first novel for fourteen years: his English, though not as wild as it once was, still has a flavour of the early school-leaver, a newcomer to the language. The very title shows it. No Englishman would lay such stress on the dull word "remote"; but for Tutuola it has a resonance. "Witch-Herbalist" must be his own coinage. There are people in Nigeria whom our imperial ancestors might vaguely have called witches or witch-finders or witch-doctors, without...