[Tutuola] is the most moralistic of all Nigerian writers…. [He] has his two feet firmly planted in the hard soil of an ancient oral and moral tradition.

Of course Tutuola's art conceals—or rather clothes—his purpose, as good art often does. But anybody who asks what the story is about can hardly have read him. And I suspect that many people who talk about Tutuola one way or another have not read him.

The first two sentences in The Palm-Wine Drinkard tell us what the story is about:

I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life.

The reader may, of course, be so taken with Tutuola's vigorous and unusual prose style or by that felicitous coinage, drinkard, that he misses the social and ethical question being proposed...