Elinor Rooks

Palm oil is cheap, versatile and monstrously destructive. I trace the origins of this ecological and humanitarian catastrophe to its West African origins, where the oil palm went from an example of successful agroforestry into a monocultural scourge. There, at this site of transformation, we will discover a shockingly prescient depiction of palm oil’s potential horrors. This ecological horror story has gone unrecognised in the postcolonial canon for decades: Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard.

Palm oil was an early driver of imperial expansion in Nigeria. Its value as an export helped to supplant and end the trans-Atlantic slave trade—yet intensified production of palm oil increased local demand for slave labour, stimulating slave raids and civil wars. From the beginning of the twentieth century, demand and prices increased sharply, encouraging the expansion of palm oil plantations across southern Nigeria.

Tutuola’s novel responds to this intensified cultivation. Tutuola turns oil into wine—both come from the same oil palm, and the Drinkard’s plantation is readily recognisable. The greed, excess and destructive effects of the Drinkard’s appetites are mapped onto the Bush of Ghosts, and both the character and the landscape embody the dangers of unbounded, monomaniacal consumption. This ecocritical reading of The Palm-Wine Drinkard not only uncovers a powerful literary response to the palm oil industry, it also renders legible a notoriously difficult modern classic.

The Unacknowledged Ghosts of a Century of War: The Yoruba Wars and the Novels of Amos Tutuola During the nineteenth century, in the southwest of what is now Nigeria, the Yoruba peoples suffered nearly a hundred years of war. Many cities and countless villages were wiped out, thousands of civilians were killed, enslaved or perished of famine. The wars were ended abruptly by the British Empire, but they were never resolved, simply suppressed. Memory of the wars was also repressed by new nationalist movements, who created myths of timeless, unifying tradition, divorced from history. The sense of hostile fragmentation has not vanished, however: in Nigeria, since 1999, communal conflicts have claimed 13,500 lives. By reading Tutuola's texts against this history, we see how unspeakable trauma can be voiced, cried out worldwide—and yet, can go unheard. The history of the Yoruba Wars is, like the slave trade, a history which is difficult to look at directly: they are histories of guilt, of internecine violence, and histories which whisper threats of future conflict. Anthropologist Rosalind Shaw has demonstrated how these dangerous, traumatic histories are indirectly remembered through folklore and folk practice: predatory spirits, for example, which echo slave raiders. We find this kind of encoding elaborated and expanded upon in the novels of Amos Tutuola, novels which have almost universally been dismissed as fanciful. Read against the history of the Yoruba Wars, however, these novels are illuminated as dramatisations of trauma, riven by splits between self and other and haunted by violence. Against nationalist myths of unity, Tutuola's novels foreground division, multiplicity, interruptions and violent eruptions.

Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) was the first African novel to be published in English outside Africa—and, as a result, the text’s journey towards publication required that both author and publishers navigate wholly uncharted territory. This process is captured in a detailed archive of correspondence, which, despite having received little critical attention, is of great significance to the history of African literature. Not only does it show the first recognition of a Western market for ‘world literature,’ it also reveals quite unexpected power dynamics, in which Tutuola, often perceived as naïve, asserts confident agency from the earliest stages.
We might expect that, between a major British press and a Nigerian author with limited education, power would be concentrated in the hands of the former. However, in spite of Tutuola’s marginalised position, the correspondence not only shows the two parties actively engaged in mutual negotiations, we find Tutuola constantly seizing the initiative: securing better terms, promoting his next manuscript, then seeking translation and adaptation rights. Meanwhile, Faber&Faber is overwhelmingly enthusiastic, positive and accommodating—responding to Tutuola’s request for an advance, for instance, with an emphatic marginal “yes.”
However, internal correspondence also reveals uncertainties, not only about the peculiarities of this particular text, but also about the concept of an African as an author for Western audiences. We will trace these crossing currents and surprising dynamics, revealing the wide-ranging implications of this daring, seminal moment in publication history.

Public health campaigns are sites of intersection between government authority and public vulnerability, scientific research and popular understandings; and the ways in which these factors interact strongly impact the success or failure of public health campaigns. In this paper, I will compare public responses to two large-scale disease control efforts: the recent campaign against Ebola in West Africa and the mid-twentieth century attempts to handle outbreaks of sleeping sickness, or trypanosomiasis. I will demonstrate the social functions that diseases serve and, thus, the vital importance of understanding them from a medical humanities perspective.
During the recent Ebola outbreaks in West Africa, public health measures were met with varying degrees of resistance and scepticism, including rumours of cannibalism, zombies and secret bio-weapons. More than fifty years ago, similarly fantastic rumours plagued colonial efforts to study and control trypanosomiasis in the region.
This paper will examine the different ways in which Ebola and trypanosomiasis have been understood by locals and officials; how the diseases influenced interactions between humans and the wilds; and the methods by which officials sought to control, not only the disease, but the wild spaces from which it emerged and the populations which it infected.