Amos Tutuola - The Palm Wine Drinkard

The Palm-Wine Drinkard (subtitled "and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead's Town") is a novel published in 1952 by the Nigerian author Amos Tutuola. The first African novel published in English outside of Africa, this quest tale based on Yoruba folktales is written in a modified English or Pidgin English. In it, a man follows his brewer into the land of the dead, encountering many spirits and adventures. The novel has always been controversial, inspiring both admiration and contempt among Western and Nigerian critics, but has emerged as one of the most important texts in the African literary canon, translated into more than a dozen languages.

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The Palm-Wine Drinkard, novel by Amos Tutuola, published in 1952 and since translated into many languages. Written in the English of the Yoruba oral tradition, the novel was the first Nigerian book to achieve international fame. The story is a classic quest tale in which the hero, a lazy boy who likes to spend his days drinking palm wine, gains wisdom, confronts death, and overcomes many perils in the course of his journey. It has thematic links to The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, a work that profoundly influenced many Nigerian writers.

Written in a funny Nigerian pidgin English:

pidgin is a grammatically simplified language that develops impromptu to enable communication between groups of people who share no common native tongue. They typically emerge in specific contact zones—such as during trade, colonization, or plantation labor—by blending simplified grammar and core vocabulary from multiple languages