The Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola (1920-1997) is famous for his fantastic tales which, in their content, depend heavily on the folklore of his ancestral Yoruba people.

Amos Tutuola was born in Abeokuta (Yorubaland). His father's death in 1939 prevented him from pursuing his studies. During World War II he joined the Royal Air Force as a blacksmith, and when the war was over, he became a messenger in the labor department in Lagos.

As he enjoyed some reputation as a storyteller among his friends, Tutuola devoted the ample leisure afforded by his unexacting functions to penning in his own idiosyncratic brand of Nigerian English some of the bizarre tales which abound in Yoruba oral lore and which D. O. Fagunwa had recorded in his vernacular storybooks. The result was The Palmwine Drinkard and His Dead Palmwine Tapster in the Dead's Town (1952). The book was an immediate success.

While English...