When The Palm-Wine Drinkard was published in 1952, its language sparked a fierce debate among Nigerian intellectuals. With only six years of formal schooling, Amos Tutuola wrote in a style that was neither Standard British English nor pidgin, a hybrid language composed of English vocabulary blended with the grammatical structures of indigenous West African languages. Instead, the novel was written in a literary language that directly translated the patterns, cadences, and syntax of his native Yoruba into English words, producing distinctive phrasings like the titular drinkard and sentences that mirror Yoruba’s open syllable structure. For many educated Nigerians in the midst of independence from the British Empire, this was a source of embarrassment. They worried the novel’s language would hand colonial commentators evidence that Africans wrote English poorly, undermining efforts to present a sophisticated modern identity abroad.

In the context of the specific literary-critical debate, scholars refer to this issue as the language question, most famously staged between Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Achebe argued that English could be reshaped from within to carry African experience. Ngũgĩ, by contrast, argued that no amount of Africanizing English could recover what indigenous languages carried, and that African writers should abandon colonial languages altogether. Tutuola’s technique, however, exhibited a closer formal precedent than either camp. The Nigerian poet and novelist Gabriel Okara, whose 1964 novel The Voice, translated directly from the Ijo (Ijaw) language, imposed Ijo syntax onto English so as to express African ideas and images in an authentic manner. Notably, the novel’s Western reception was not a simple counterweight to Nigerian anxiety. Dylan Thomas’s celebrated 1952 review in The Observer praised the “brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching story” (Thomas, Dylan. “Blithe Spirits: Original Observer review by Dylan Thomas of the palm-wine drinkard.” Guardian, 5 Oct. 2013)—language that leaned on exoticized, “primitive” associations with Africa, precisely the reception Nigerian critics feared. It was Achebe himself, writing later in Tutuola’s defense, who offered the more assessment that Tutuola’s art “conceals—or rather clothes—his purpose, as all good art must do.” Achebe’s quote proved endearing in critical discussions of the novel and can now be found on the cover of several editions of The Palm-Wine Drinkard.