Palm Oil in Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard
Palm oil is cheap, versatile and monstrously destructive. I will 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 originated as a West African foodstuff, gathered along with palm wine and nuts from the semi-wild palms which followed farmers’ shifting settlements through bush fallows. In the last century, it has become integral to globalised capitalism: used in dozens of products, it has replaced vast swathes of tropical forest across West Africa and South East Asia. In Edo State alone, sixty thousand people have recently been displaced by Belgian plantations.
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.