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Amos Tutuola and the Elusiveness of Completeness

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Amos Tutuola and the Elusiveness of Completeness Stichproben. Wiener Zeitschrift für kritische Afrikastudien. No. 29/2015, Vol. 15, 1-47. Amos Tutuola and the Elusiveness of Completeness Francis B. Nyamnjoh Abstract This paper is a contribution to the unfinished business of transformation of colonial and apartheid ideologies on being human and being African that continue to shape how research is conceptualized, taught and practiced in universities across Africa. Endogenous epistemologies such as depicted by Amos Tutuola in his writings, despite their popularity with ordinary Africans and with elite Africans especially in settings away from the scrutinising prescriptive gaze of their western and westernised counterparts, are mainly dormant or invisible in scholarly circles where they are often ignored, caricatured or misrepresented through problematic categories that are actively and uncritically internalised and reproduced by a Eurocentric modern intellectual elite. Africans immersed in popular traditions of meaning-making are denied the right to think and represent their realities in accordance with the civilisations and universes they know best. Often, the ways of life they cherish are labelled and dismissed too eagerly as traditional knowledge by some of the very African intellectual elite they look up to for protection. The paper makes a case for space to be created for such sidestepped traditions of knowledge. It draws attention to Africa’s possibilities, prospects and emergent capacities for being and becoming in tune with its creativity and imagination. It speaks to the ‘frontier African’ at the crossroads and junctions of encounters, facilitating creative conversations and challenging regressive logics of exclusionary identities. The paper uses Tutuola’s stories to question dualistic assumptions about reality and scholarship, and to call for conviviality, interconnections and interdependence between competing knowledge traditions in Africa. Introduction This paper explores how the flexibility and fluidity of reality depicted in Amos Tutuola’s universe challenges a social science founded narrowly on dichotomies, dualisms and bounded identities. It examines the extent to which Tutuola’s books provide popular ontological insights that could contribute significantly to the reconstruction of a decolonised social science 2 Stichproben in Africa. The paper argues that the universe depicted by Tutuola in his novels – The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts – is one of infinite possibilities where nothing is ever complete, and where to seek or claim completeness is to ignore, to one’s peril, the reality of incompleteness as the normal order of things. Humans, ghosts, spirits, monsters, freak creatures, death and the dead, and gods are far from seeking completeness as a permanent state of being – an ultimate and extravagant illusion in a context where categories acquire meaning only through action and interaction. To achieve greater efficacy in their actions and interactions, Tutuola’s creatures seek creative ways to activate themselves to commensurate levels of potency. This is achieved through relationships of interdependence with incomplete others, as well as through technologies of self-extension, jujus and magic, which can be acquired and lost with circumstances. Tutuola himself epitomises the universe he depicts, not only through his own elusive quest for completeness in a world of zero sum games of civilisations founded on exclusionary violence, but also by pointing a critical finger at the modern African intellectual elite who have unquestioningly yielded to a narrow Eurocentric index of civilisation and humanity. This paper thus explores what Tutuola offers ongoing epistemological debates on the study of Africa more broadly, especially in social science disciplines such as anthropology and sociology. It highlights and discusses elements from the two novels that emphasize the logic of inclusion over the logic of exclusion and the violence of zero sum games often uncritically internalised and reproduced by practicing anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists in Africa fixated with micro categorisations, abstractions, appearances and permanence. The paper argues that Tutuola’s novels offer comprehensive depictions of African endogenous universes wherein reality is more than meets the eye and the world an experience of life beyond sensory perceptions. These are universes where being and becoming materialise through the consciousness that gives it meaning. Consciousness matters more than the containers that house it. Consciousness can inhabit any container – human and non-human, Amos Tutuola and the Elusiveness of Completeness 3 animate and inanimate, visible and invisible – regardless of the state of completeness or incompleteness of the container in question. These universes celebrate what it means to be a frontier being, at the crossroads and junctions of multiple influences and possibilities, mixing and blending to forge a vision where certainties are never too rigid and the prospect of innovation a constant source of hope. Furthermore, the paper argues that Tutuola’s novels are not just works of fiction. They are founded on the lived realities of Yoruba society – realities shared with many other communities across the continent – and depict endogenous epistemologies that are very popular in Africa, as the stories he recounts are commonplace across the continent. However, despite their popularity with ordinary Africans and with elite Africans especially in settings away from the scrutinising prescriptive gaze of their western and westernised counterparts, such epistemologies are mainly dormant or invisible in scholarly circles because they are often ignored, caricatured or misrepresented in the categories of ‘magic’, ‘witchcraft’, ‘sorcery’, ‘superstition’, ‘primitivism’, ‘savagery’ and ‘animism’ inspired by the origins and dominance of Eurocentric social sciences. Like the narrators in his novels, Tutuola is unapologetically part and parcel of the universe that fascinates him. His stories are contributions to his mission of keeping alive and relevant African ways of knowing and knowledge production, and fending off the one-dimensionalism of resilient colonialism and the ambitions of completeness which it claims and inspires. Tutuola and the Extravagant Illusion of Completeness Amos Tutuola died on 7 June 1997 desperately seeking completeness in a world of binary oppositions and zero sum games. His contribution to understanding epistemologies endogenous to Africa is in his elusive quest to be a “complete gentleman” – through publication of his stories inspired by his native Yoruba universe –, and to be recognised by and relevant to Yoruba, Nigerian and African readers as well as to the rest of the world. He found some fulfilment through the international recognition accorded him 4 Stichproben by his London based publisher Faber and Faber, only to be brushed aside for much of his life by fellow Nigerians seeking completeness of their own under a Eurocentric index of modernity. Tutuola, especially since his death, has been described by some Nigerian writers, critics and scholars – many of whom initially regarded him as “a dangerous barbarian” (Lindfors 1999: 140), a disgrace to their modernist ambitions, and as someone who sought to undo their hard-earned achievements in the pursuit of western civilisation by perpetuating conceptions of Africa as a dark continent and Nigerians as primitive peoples1 – as a spellbinding visionary raconteur and a storytelling genius who fruitfully combined magic with realism in his highly imaginative, poetic though, as perceived by some, grammatically limited, prose (Lindfors 1999: 136-144). Tutuola grew “much too large to ignore” in African literary circles, even by his detractors (Lindfors, 1999: 144), so let us take a look at what he has to offer ongoing epistemological debates on the study of Africa more broadly, especially in the social sciences. It is not without significance that the publisher Faber and Faber turned to “Daryll Forde, a renowned Africanist teaching in the Department of Anthropology at University College, London,” as “an anthropologist familiar with the workings of the West African imagination,” (Lindfors1999: 116) for an opinion on whether Tutuola’s manuscript – The Palm-Wine Drinkard – had “its roots in the common West African mind” (Lindfors 1999: 116). Two other anthropologists – Mary Danielli and Geoffrey Parrinder – also evaluated and recommended publication of the book (Lindfors 1999: 127). Whether or not Faber and Faber turned to anthropologists because the book was “the unsophisticated product of a West African mind”, or because “[i]ts interest is [was] possibly more anthropological than literary”, it was evident to them that the book had “a certain quality as a piece of unusual 1 In his introduction to the 2014 edition of The Palm-Wine Drinkard, Wole Soyinka observes that in Nigeria, “Amos Tutuola’s first published novel was given short shrift”, and that although the “hostile reception was not quite as uniform as some of the expatriate community (mostly British, and mostly academic) tried to suggest”, the “general institutional attitude” to the novel and author “ranged between outright dismissal and condescension” (Soyinka 2014: v). Amos Tutuola and the Elusiveness of Completeness 5 writing” (Lindfors 1999: 127). As far back as the early 1950s, Faber and Faber, a publisher, was perceptive enough to see anthropology in literature and literature in anthropology, an interconnection
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