Amos Tutuola’s debut novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), is a foundational work of modern African literature that blends Yoruba folklore with a surreal, phantasmagorical style. The novel is renowned for its form of English that uses Yoruba syntax and cadence to create a distinctive narrative voice. The story follows an unnamed protagonist whose life of leisure is devoted entirely to drinking palm-wine. When his personal tapster dies, the protagonist embarks on a perilous quest into the world of spirits and monsters to find his tapster in the Deads’ Town. This journey is a mock-heroic saga, thereby Challenging the Nature of Heroism. Throughout the novel, the narrator confronts The Uncrossable Divide Between Life and Death.

Upon its release, The Palm-Wine Drinkard was celebrated internationally by figures like Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, but it was met with criticism from some educated Nigerians who were concerned by its unconventional English. Over time, the novel has been recognized as a highly influential work, with Tutuola cited as a forerunner to the magical realism movement. The novel was named one of Time magazine’s 100 best fantasy books of all time. Throughout the novel, Tutuola weaves together the mythological and the modern, exploring The Encroachment of Western Technology and Colonial Bureaucracy as spirits operate within a cash economy and magical events are compared to airplanes and telephones. Tutuola followed this debut with novels such as My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. The Palm-Wine Drinkard was also adapted into a popular Yoruba-language folk opera in 1963 by Nigerian dramatist Kola Ogunmola.

This guide refers to the 2014 Grove Press paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide feature depictions of graphic violence, child death, addiction, animal death, and physical abuse.

Plot Summary

The narrator is a renowned palm-wine drinkard, a man whose entire existence revolves around consuming hundreds of kegs of palm-wine daily. His wealthy father supports this lifestyle by providing a personal palm-wine tapster and a vast farm of 560,000 palm-trees. This life of blissful inebriation ends abruptly when the tapster falls from a tree and dies. Unable to find a replacement who can satisfy his immense thirst, abandoned by his fair-weather friends, the drinkard resolves to undertake a perilous quest to find his deceased tapster in the Deads’ Town. Armed with his father’s juju, or magical charms, he ventures into the bush. His journey leads him to an old man who is a god. The god promises to help if the drinkard can first fetch a specific bell from a blacksmith and then capture Death itself. The drinkard uses his juju to transform into a bird to spy on the god and learn which item to retrieve. He then travels to Death’s house, outwits him in a magical contest, and tricks him into a pit covered by a net. When the drinkard presents the captured Death, however, the terrified god flees. Death escapes into the world, now free to roam without a permanent home.

Continuing his quest, the drinkard arrives in a town whose headman promises information about the tapster in exchange for the rescue of his daughter. The daughter had become infatuated with and followed a “beautiful ‘complete’ gentleman” (14) from the market. Using his juju to become a lizard, the drinkard follows the gentleman and discovers the gentleman’s horrific secret: He is a Skull who has rented every part of his body. The Skull takes the daughter to his subterranean home, where he makes her a captive by tying a magical cowrie to her neck that renders her mute and which sounds an alarm if she tries to escape. The drinkard, calling himself “Father of gods” (5), rescues the girl, transforming her into a kitten to sneak her out of the Skull’s home. To cure her lingering muteness and remove the cowrie, he spies on the Skull again, learning that she must eat an “opposite leaf” (27) and a “compound leaf” (28). After administering the cure, the headman gives his daughter to the drinkard as a wife. They live with her father for several years until a child named Zurrjir emerges fully formed from his wife’s swollen thumb. The boy is supernaturally strong and destructive; the drinkard is forced to kill the boy by trapping him in a house and setting it ablaze.

After the wife’s father finally gives them a lead on the tapster’s whereabouts, the couple sets off. As they leave, the wife insists on retrieving a trinket from the ashes of the burnt house, from which a half-bodied baby emerges. This new creature is insatiably hungry and forces them to carry him by magically obscuring their vision and stopping their breath when they refuse. They are freed from this torment only when they encounter three personified beings—Drum, Song, and Dance—who mesmerize the baby and he follows them away. 

Now penniless, the drinkard turns himself into a canoe so his wife can ferry people across a river, earning them a fortune. Their journey is fraught with bizarre dangers. They are pulled irresistibly into the Unreturnable-Heaven’s Town, a place inhabited by cruel creatures who torture the couple by shaving their heads with broken glass and burying them up to their necks. After a rainstorm, they escape and burn the town to the ground in revenge. They find refuge inside a giant, magical white tree, home to the Faithful-Mother, who aids travelers in distress. Here, they live in luxury for over a year, and the drinkard sells their death, becoming temporarily immortal.

Upon leaving the white tree, they are led by a mysterious Red-lady to the Red-town, where everything and everyone is stained red. The Red-king explains his people were cursed and, each year, they must sacrifice a victim to two monstrous red creatures, a fish and a bird. Knowing he cannot die, the drinkard volunteers and kills both monsters with his gun. Fearing his power, the Red-king and his entire populace transform into two giant red trees and flee. The drinkard pursues them, reclaims his wife, and their presence breaks the curse, returning the people to their normal color. He becomes a wealthy farmer in their new town and hires an “Invisible-Pawn” named “Give and Take” (92). The pawn is an incredible worker but causes chaos. When told to take some corn for himself, he and his legion of Bush-creatures strip all the farms in the region bare. The enraged townspeople turn on the drinkard, who calls the pawn for help; the pawn and his followers then massacre the entire town, leaving only the drinkard and his wife alive.

Finally, they reach the Deads’ Town, a place where everyone walks backward and life is a mirror-image of the living world. The drinkard is reunited with his tapster, who is now fully a dead man and cannot return with him. As a parting gift, the tapster gives him a magical egg capable of granting any wish. On the journey home, they are attacked by hostile dead babies, captured by a giant, and enslaved. They escape after his wife observes their captor using a magical leaf to revive his monstrous servants and uses it to revive the drinkard after a fight. Soon after, they are swallowed by a hungry-creature, but the drinkard shoots their way out of its stomach from the inside. They pass through a mixed town, where the drinkard is asked to judge two impossibly complex legal and moral dilemmas, which he adjourns indefinitely before they depart.

After one last escape from dancing mountain-creatures, the drinkard and his wife finally arrive back in their home town. They find it gripped by a terrible famine, caused by a primordial feud between Land and Heaven over who should get to eat a single mouse. The drinkard uses the magical egg to summon feasts, feeding the entire population and becoming a celebrated hero. The constant crowds become a nuisance, however, and during their reckless revelry, the people accidentally smash the egg. The drinkard pieces it back together, but now it produces only millions of whips. He tricks the ungrateful populace into gathering one last time and unleashes the whips on them as punishment. Seeing the famine continue, he then organizes the town elders to make a sacrifice to Heaven. An enslaved person carries the offering to the sky. Heaven accepts Land’s surrender and rain begins to fall, ending the famine.