The first questioner is, if she is to judge by accent, from the Midwest of the United States. The first novel she ever read by an African, decades ago, says the woman, was by Amos Tutuola, she forgets the title. ('The Palm Wine Drinkard', suggests Egudu. 'Yes, that's it,' she replies.) She was captivated by it. She thought it was the harbinger of great things to come. So she was disappointed, terribly disappointed, to hear that Tutuola was not respected in his own country, that educated Nigerians disparaged him and considered his reputation in the West unmerited. Was this true? Was Tutuola the kind of oral novelist our lecturer had in mind? What has happened to Tutuola? Had more of his books been translated?

No, responds Egudu, Tutuola has not been translated any further, in fact he has not been translated at all, at least not into English. Why not? Because he did not need to be translated. Because he had written in English all along. 'Which is the root of the problem that the questioner raises. The language of Amos Tutuola is English, but not standard English, not the English that Nigerians of the 1950s went to school and college to learn. It is the language of a semieducated clerk, a man with no more than elementary schooling, barely comprehensible to an outsider, fixed up for publication by British editors. Where Tutuola's writing was frankly illiterate they corrected it; what they refrained from correcting was what seemed authentically Nigerian to them, that is to say, what to their ears sounded picturesque, exotic, folkloric.

'From what I have just been saying,' Egudu continues, 'you may imagine that I too disapprove of Tutuola or the Tutuola phenomenon. Far from it. Tutuola was repudiated by so-called educated Nigerians because they were embarrassed by him--embarrassed that they might be lumped with him as natives who did not know how to write proper English. As for me, I am happy to be a native, a Nigerian native, a native Nigerian. In this battle I am on Tutuola's side. Tutuola is or was a gifted storyteller. I am glad you like him. Several more books penned by him were put out in England, though none, I would say, as good as The Palm Wine Drinkard. And, yes, he is the kind of writer I was referring to, an oral writer.

'I have responded to you at length because the case ofTutuola is so instructive. What makes Tutuola stand out is that he did not adjust his language to the expectations - or to what he might have thought, had he been less naive, would be the expectations - of the foreigners who would read and judge him. Not knowing better, he wrote as he spoke. He therefore had to yield in a particularly helpless way to being packaged, for the West, as an African exotic.

'But, ladies and gentlemen, who among African writers is not exotic? The truth is, to the West we Africans are all exotic, when we are not simply savage. That is our fate. Even here, on this ship sailing towards the continent that ought to be the most exotic of all, and the most savage, the continent with no human standards at all, I can sense I am exotic.'

[...]

In her opinion, all of Emmanuel's talk of an oral novel, a novel that has kept in touch with the human voice and hence with the human body, a novel that is not disembodied like the Western novel but speaks the body and the body's truth, is just another way of propping up the mystique of the African as the last repository of primal human energies. Emmanuel blames his Western publishers and his Western readers for driving him to exoticize Africa; but Emmanuel has a stake in exoticizing himself. Emmanuel, she happens to know, has not written a book of substance in ten years. When she first got to know him he could still honourably call himself a writer. Now he makes his living by talking. His books are there as credentials, no more. A fellow entertainer he may be; a fellow writer he is not, not any longer. He is on the lecture circuit for the money, and for other rewards too. Sex, for instance. He is dark, he is exotic, he is in touch with life's energies; if he is no longer young, at least he carries himself well, wears his years with distinction. What Swedish girl would not be a pushover? (Elizabeth Costello)