Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads’ Town, published in 1952, is a quest narrative that turns appetite into experience. The everyday world exists side by side with a fantastic universe of gods, spirits, skulls, monsters, magical transformations and the dead. The uploaded text itself introduces the work as the incredible adventures of the palm-wine drinkard and his dead tapster and draws attention to the unusual English and remarkable imagery through which those adventures are narrated. Beneath its comic surface, the story explores how desire drives the quest through death, courage, marriage, greed, community and survival.
The unnamed first-person narrator introduces himself as a palm-wine drinkard from the age of ten. He is the eldest of eight children in a wealthy family, but unlike his hardworking brothers and sisters, he does no work except drink. His father therefore appoints an expert palm-wine tapster to serve him. The quantities involved are deliberately fantastic: the tapster produces huge numbers of kegs every day, and the drinkard consumes them while surrounded by innumerable friends who share his palm-wine. This opening immediately establishes the exaggerated scale and comic logic of the narrative. The hero is not introduced as courageous, morally exemplary or industrious. He is defined by appetite.
The first major disturbance comes with death. After the narrator’s father dies, the expert tapster falls from a tall palm tree and is killed. Even at this moment, the narrator’s attachment to palm-wine is stronger than conventional grief: before properly attending to the dead man, he taps another tree and drinks. Once the tapster is buried, however, the narrator discovers the practical consequences of his death. Nobody else can produce palm-wine of the same quality or quantity, and his former drinking companions gradually abandon him because there is nothing left for them to drink. He even tries ordinary water but finds it unsatisfactory. Remembering the old belief that dead people do not necessarily proceed immediately to heaven but may remain somewhere in the world, he decides to find his dead tapster.
The journey therefore begins with an absurdly selfish motive. The narrator does not leave home to save his people or discover spiritual truth; he wants his palm-wine supply restored. Yet this comic desire sends him into years of danger and makes the quest the thread that connects every later ordeal. Appetite becomes experience.
Taking his own juju and his father’s, he enters a world of forests, distant villages, and supernatural beings. He calls himself the “Father of gods who could do everything in this world”, a boast that repeatedly forces him to demonstrate courage and ingenuity. One of his first important encounters is with an old man who is, in fact, a god. The old man refuses to help him until he performs impossible tasks. The narrator uses a transformation to secretly discover which object the god has ordered from a blacksmith and successfully retrieves it. He is then ordered to bring Death himself. By cunning, magical power and courage, he manages to trap Death, although the very god who sent him on the mission becomes terrified when the narrator actually returns carrying him. Death eventually escapes, the inhabitants flee, and the drinkard must continue without receiving the information he wanted. The episode establishes the narrative pattern that dominates the book: each apparent stage of progress produces another task, another strange community or another threat.
The Complete Gentleman and the Woman Who Becomes His Wife
The drinkard eventually reaches a town whose head promises to tell him where his dead tapster is if he first rescues the man’s missing daughter. Her disappearance produces one of the most memorable episodes in the narrative. She had seen an extraordinarily handsome “complete gentleman” in the marketplace and, captivated by his physical perfection, followed him even though he warned her repeatedly to turn back. The description makes him appear almost superhuman in beauty and elegance.
Once they enter the endless forest, however, the gentleman begins returning the parts of his body to their owners. His beautiful appearance is entirely borrowed. First he returns his feet, then his belly, ribs, chest, arms and neck, paying each owner the required rent. Finally he gives back the skin and flesh of his head and is reduced to a Skull. What appeared perfectly complete in the marketplace is revealed as radically incomplete.
By the time the young woman understands the danger, escape is impossible. The Skull takes her to an underground dwelling occupied by other skulls. She is forced to sit on a frog, and a magical cowrie is tied around her neck, making her unable to speak and helping the skulls prevent her escape.
The drinkard investigates by using his supernatural powers. He follows the apparent gentleman in the form of a lizard, enters the skulls’ dwelling, discovers the imprisoned woman and eventually succeeds in carrying her away. Even after the rescue, however, the magical cowrie continues to silence her. The narrator must return secretly and discover the special leaves that can restore her speech and remove the cowrie. Once he succeeds, her parents reward him, and the rescued woman becomes his wife.
This episode marks an important expansion of the story. Until now the narrator’s quest has been primarily individual. From this point onward, his wife becomes his principal travelling companion, and the quest shows more clearly how experience is shared. She shares danger, suffering and uncertainty and repeatedly contributes intelligence and foresight to their survival.
The Complete Gentleman episode also introduces one of the work’s recurrent ideas: appearances cannot be trusted. Beauty may conceal horror, and apparently complete identities may be made from borrowed parts. The fantastic image of the gentleman gradually becoming a skull turns deception into something literally visible, deepening the quest’s exploration of illusion and experience.
A World of Transformations, Monsters and Impossible Places
Marriage does not end the quest. The drinkard still wants to find his dead tapster, and husband and wife therefore begin another series of adventures that carry the quest forward. The narrative becomes increasingly episodic, moving through strange beings and supernatural territories. The contents themselves indicate the succession of encounters: Drum, Song and Dance, the Wraith-Island, the Faithful-Mother in the White Tree, the Red-People and Red-Town, the Invisible-Pawn, the Wise King, the Deads’ Town, dead babies, the Hungry-Creature and the Mountain-Creatures.
One extraordinary episode concerns the strange child who emerges from the swollen thumb of the narrator’s wife. Almost immediately after appearing, the child speaks, grows rapidly, consumes enormous amounts of palm-wine and food and becomes violently uncontrollable. He dominates the household and terrorises the town. The narrator eventually burns the house while the child is inside, apparently destroying him, only to discover that the being can return in another form. The episode continues the story’s fascination with uncontrolled appetite and with beings whose bodily forms do not obey ordinary laws.
The travellers encounter Drum, Song and Dance not as activities but as living entities. Drum can beat itself, Song can sing with the power of many voices and Dance can dance irresistibly. Those who hear or see them are compelled to join. Pleasure thus becomes a danger because it destroys self-control. This is characteristic of Tutuola’s narrative universe: what attracts can enslave, and what delights can also become destructive. The episode reinforces the quest’s larger pattern of desire turning into experience.
The travellers encounter further dangers as they move from bush to bush. The White Tree and the Faithful-Mother offer temporary protection, but beyond them lie the Red-Bush and the Red-Town. There, virtually everything—people, animals, vegetation, food and water—is red. Even the travellers themselves become red when they enter. The strange colour initially evokes fear, but the episode gradually reveals the Red-People and their condition.
Later the narrator becomes wealthy in a new settlement and employs a mysterious worker known as the Invisible-Pawn or “Give and Take”. The name contains its own warning. The creature performs enormous amounts of work at night and appears extraordinarily useful, but the narrator eventually discovers that the worker is also connected to destructive bush creatures and can take far more than he gives in return. The narrator’s wife had foreseen this contradiction precisely: the man would be an extraordinary worker but also an extraordinary robber. The episode again shows that gifts and advantages in this narrative frequently contain hidden dangers.
Throughout these adventures, transformation is essential to survival. The drinkard may become a bird, lizard, fire, air, canoe or pebble, while his wife can be transformed into a wooden doll or another form and hidden from danger. The boundaries between human beings, animals, objects and supernatural creatures remain fluid.
The world of the novel therefore cannot be understood through ordinary realistic expectations. A supernatural event is not treated as an interruption of reality; it is part of the normal reality of the narrator’s journey.
The Deads’ Town and the Failure of the Original Quest
Eventually the couple receives definite information that the tapster is living in the Deads’ Town. No ordinary road leads there. The narrative emphasises that they must travel through the bush because living people do not normally make such a journey. The table of contents itself marks the Deads’ Town as the central destination towards which numerous previous episodes have been leading.
When the drinkard and his wife finally enter the town, they discover that the dead live according to rules that are the reverse of those governing ordinary human life. They walk backwards and react violently to signs associated with living bodies, especially blood. The travellers are outsiders not simply because they come from another place but because they belong to another condition of existence.
The long-awaited meeting with the tapster is therefore very different from what the drinkard had imagined. The tapster explains that after dying he had first undergone a period in which he became qualified as a “full” dead person before coming to live permanently among the dead. His present existence no longer corresponds to that of living people. Most importantly, he refuses to return with the drinkard.
This is the decisive moment in the narrator’s quest. He has travelled for years because he imagined that finding the dead man might allow him to restore his former life. The tapster’s refusal establishes a limit even within a world full of magic. The boundaries between forms may often be crossed, but death cannot simply be undone. The dead belong with the dead and the living must return to the living. The quest therefore fails in its original purpose.
Yet the tapster does not send his former master away empty-handed. He gives him a magical egg that produces whatever is commanded when placed in water. The drinkard must return home without the tapster but with an object containing extraordinary potential. The apparent failure thus becomes another form of gain. He cannot recover the past, but he can bring something new out of his encounter with it.
The Journey Back, the Hungry-Creature and the Return Home
Leaving the Deads’ Town does not immediately return the couple to safety. Their journey home is itself full of danger. Among their encounters are groups of dead babies and other frightening beings associated with the road from the land of the dead.
One of the most important later episodes concerns the Hungry-Creature. This being exists almost entirely through appetite. It continually cries “hungry” and cannot be satisfied by any amount of food. Its hunger is absolute and endless.
When the creature tries to take the magical egg and attacks the wife, the drinkard transforms her and their belongings into a wooden doll. The Hungry-Creature eventually swallows it. The narrator refuses to abandon his wife and permits himself to be swallowed as well. Inside the creature, he restores his wife and possessions to their original form, uses his gun and cutlass, and finally cuts their way out.
The episode draws a striking parallel to Drinkard himself. At the beginning of the book, his appetite for palm-wine seems almost limitless. The Hungry-Creature presents appetite in its most extreme form: consumption without satisfaction. The creature could consume everything in existence and still cry for more. Through fantasy, the story turns excess into a monster.
The travellers eventually reach the Unknown-Mountain and encounter the Mountain-Creatures, who insist that the wife continue dancing after she has become exhausted. Once again, what begins as pleasure becomes coercion. The narrator rescues her by transforming her into a wooden doll and himself into a pebble. Crossing a river finally places them beyond the power of the Mountain-Creatures.
The couple then reaches the narrator’s home. His first response resembles his old behaviour: he drinks large quantities of palm-wine with friends again. Yet he has returned carrying the magical egg, and the circumstances at home are very different from those he left behind.
The Egg, Famine and the Final Restoration of Order
The narrator discovers that the land is suffering from catastrophic famine. Rain has stopped, vegetation and rivers have dried up, and people are dying from hunger. The narrative explains this disaster through another mythic story: Land and Heaven once quarrelled over a mouse they had hunted. Each claimed superiority, and after their disagreement Heaven withheld rain and dew from the earth.
In this setting, the egg acquired from the dead tapster becomes extraordinarily important. The narrator places it in water and orders it to produce food and drink. It feeds his family and then his old friends. Soon news spreads, and vast numbers of people from many towns come to eat. The private gift from the Deads’ Town becomes a means of feeding an entire famine-stricken population.
This development gives the journey a meaning far larger than its original intention. The drinkard set out because he wanted palm-wine for himself. The object he brings back from the dead can now preserve others’ lives.
Yet excess again creates disaster. The crowds become increasingly demanding and refuse to leave. The narrator himself asks the egg to produce money. During reckless celebration, the magical egg is accidentally broken. After it is repaired, its nature changes: rather than generating food, it produces countless whips that violently attack the people.
The pattern is significant. Unlimited abundance produces unlimited desire, and unlimited desire eventually destroys the source of abundance. The magical egg therefore cannot permanently solve the famine.
A more fundamental restoration is required. The narrator and the surviving elders prepare a sacrifice for Heaven. After others refuse the dangerous task, a slave carries the sacrifice upward. It symbolically acknowledges Heaven’s seniority over Land. Heaven accepts the offering, heavy rain begins, and after months of regular rainfall the famine finally ends. The final pages explicitly describe the sacrifice, Heaven’s acceptance and the restoration of rain.
The narrative thus ends not with magical abundance but with the restoration of the proper relationship between Land and Heaven. The hero began as someone whose entire life was organised around personal consumption. His journey took him through death, marriage, danger, deception, supernatural communities and experiences of insatiable appetite. He returned without the tapster he wanted but with a gift capable of serving society.
The ending does not turn him into a conventionally virtuous hero. He remains comic, excessive and morally ambiguous. Yet the scale of his life has changed. A journey begun for palm-wine becomes connected with famine, survival, and the restoration of communal order.
The Palm-Wine Drinkard therefore possesses a circular structure without simply returning to the beginning. The narrator leaves home, crosses a succession of supernatural boundaries, reaches the world of the dead and comes back. Geographically, he returns to where he started, but narratively the journey has enlarged both his experience and the significance of his actions.
At the centre of the story lies a simple but powerful discovery: the past cannot be completely recovered. The dead tapster cannot become the living tapster again. The drinkard must return home without him. What he brings back is not the old life but the possibility of something new.
The strange adventures between departure and return are therefore not accidental digressions. Together, they transform a comic search for palm-wine into an expansive story about human desire, mortality, survival, and the unpredictable relationship between what people seek and what they ultimately receive.
