Amos Tutuola: Emerging African Literature

It is not the aim of this paper to enter into a discussion of the various schools of thought connected with the study of social anthropology in our study of emerging Africa. The question I am concerned with here is mainly how to establish a basis for a discussion of African literary activity by writers who are not indigenous to the Dark Continent. Leonard W. Doobs voices the concern of those modern anthropologists who suggest that it can be extremely hazardous to use a psychiatric category from the West in a non-Western society. “European and American psychologists are generally convinced that they have enough unsolved problems at home, among both animals and human beings, and that hence they do not need to plunge into the exotic phenomena of Africa.”1

In a study of Amos Tutuola, there are certain psychiatric categories, such as the syndromes of paranoia and lycanthropy which will have to be taken into consideration. When a man feels persecuted, he is subject to psychic disturbances whether he lives among Eskimos, African pygmies, or highly progressive members of modern civilization. The question is therefore whether the individual so afflicted can consciously or unconsciously take refuge within the secure limits of a collective frame that acts as an institutionalized prophylactic sphere. If his society provides a measure of prophylaxis, in terms of ritual for instance, he may escape the ordeal of psychic upheaval. However, if he has undergone a pronounced process of differentiation, as is the case in modern Western societies, he may have undercut his route of retreat into such a sphere of collective security. The result is alienation, concomitant with the gamut of pathogenic disturbances. The case of Amos Tutuola lies somewhere within these two areas of psychological delineation, and it is the aim of this paper to probe the setting of this writer as it relates to the superimposed white man's culture which up to recent times dominated the Dark Continent.