Summary
Introduction
Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) opens simply: When a raiding party from a nearby tribal war descends on a village, looking to conscript slaves, a terrified seven-year-old Nigerian boy runs off into the wild bush country. Soon, the boy finds himself in an alternate dimension, peopled by what he calls “ghosts”—darkly fanciful creatures with magical powers they use for both good and evil.
More than anything else, Tutuola’s bold novel reflects Africa’s mid-twentieth-century emergence from centuries of European colonial occupation and its rediscovery of the manic energy and creative freedom of its own indigenous folk cultures.
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts upends assumptions Western writers and readers have about storytelling itself. As such, the novel reflects both Tutuola’s love of the raw, anarchic magic of the folktales of his native western Nigeria and his admiration for the structured chaos of The Thousand and One Arabian Nights.
Plot Summary
As the novel opens, armed raiders from a nearby tribal war invade a young boy’s village, aiming to conscript anyone healthy into slavery. They detain his older brother, but the boy escapes.
Driven by fear, the boy heads into the bush, where he finds a door on the side of a small hill. He enters, discovering three colored rooms: one gold, one silver, and one copper. Ghosts of matching colors watch him. When he approaches one, his body changes to match their color. They demand the boy select one of them to be his master and begin to fight each other.
A bug-covered, disgusting-smelling ghost enters. The boy dubs him the “Smelling-Ghost” and leaves with him. The ghost rudely shoves the boy into a sack filled.
The two head to a nearby town, where the ghost allows the boy out of the bag to sleep. Then, drawing on the power of a talisman called a juju, Smelling-Ghost turns the boy into a series of animals: a monkey, lion, camel, bull, and finally, a horse, which he rides. When they arrive at the first town, the ghost turns the boy back. Unsettled, the boy steals the juju and hides it.
Back in the bag, the boy tries to use the juju to escape but accidentally turns himself into a cow. He is put in a herd and taken to market. There, a woman who needs a cow to sacrifice to the gods buys him, seemingly sealing his fate.
The next day, however, the boy—still a cow—escapes. He falls into a pond and emerges as a boy. He wanders for days until he finds a large branch with a hole in it. He climbs into it, desperate to sleep.
Homeless Ghost picks up the branch and nearly throws it into his campfire until the boy cries out. To the Homeless Ghost, the boy’s panicked cries sound like music, delighting him.
Town to town, the Homeless Ghost becomes famous for this magical branch. Eventually, the boy escapes from the Homeless Ghost and arrives at a town peopled by burglar-ghosts. There, the boy falls in love with a beautiful ghostess, and they plan to marry.
At the wedding, however, the boy finds the Devil presiding, who insists on baptizing the boy with fire and hot water. Later, the boy accidentally steps on a small ghost, leading to a lawsuit and, soon after, the boy's departure from the town.
The boy travels to the next town. Suspicious, the ghosts there detain. The room he is held in transforms into a water pitcher, trapping him. In an unexpected reversal, the ghosts decide he is a god.
One night, river ghosts...
(This entire section contains 1209 words.)
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kidnap the boy—still a pitcher. Also believing he is god, they build him a small one-room house as a makeshift church. Intoxicated by the tobacco the ghosts make him smoke, the boy sings childhood songs that reveal his homesickness. When the King of the Bush of Ghosts hears about the songs, the king demands to see the boy.
At the palace, a kerfuffle between the guards shatters the pitcher, freeing the boy. He flees, taking refuge in a hole in the trunk of a large tree. The tree's resident, an armless ghost, discovers the boy. Alarmed, the boy runs.
The boy comes upon a spiderweb bush. The spiders quickly wrap him into a chrysalis. For three days, he is captive until one ghost—who thinks the trapped boy resembles his dead father—buries him, chrysalis and all, in an elaborate casket. A resurrectionist, however, disinters him.
To his dismay, the resurrectionist prepares a fire to roast him. Luckily, the chrysalis protects him, and he eventually escapes, crawling away and falling asleep.
He awakens in a new town, where he meets the Flash-eyed mother, the town's ruler, who waits patiently while her minion ghosts bring her sacrifices. She is grotesque, with more than a thousand teeth, hands like shovels, two “fearful large eyes,” and more than a million small babies pocked all over her skin. The boy joins the daily hunting parties that bring her meat.
Three years pass. The Flash-eyed mother receives a letter calling for the return of the boy to the last town from which he escaped. When they come for the boy, the army of the Flash-eyed mother prevails, slicing off the heads of the defeated army. By mistake, the boy is briefly fitted with the head of one of the ghosts. When the mistake is fixed, the boy decides to escape during the next hunting party.
When he does, he chances upon a graceful antelope, who changes into a beautiful woman. Impressed by her gentleness and power to change shapes, he accompanies her to her town.
She calls herself the Super Lady; entranced, the boy marries her. Their marriage lasts four years but dissolves when they realize they do not know if their offspring will be a human or a ghost. When the boy leaves the Super Lady, he realizes he can rise to any challenge and solve any problem. In short, he is no longer a boy.
Back on the road, the boy, now just the narrator, meets a dead cousin who introduced Christianity into his town. His cousin appoints him as a judge; together, they build prisons and courts. When his cousin learns the narrator never died, he tells him to go home.
The narrator then meets the Television-handed Ghostess, a crying ghostess covered with sores who shows the narrator a vision of his brother and mother from a screen on her palm. She promises to guide him home if he remains with her for ten years and licks her sores clean. Instead, he uses magical leaves from fruit trees to cure the woman. She instructs him to eat the tree’s fruit, which takes him home.
It has been 24 years, he calculates, that he has been gone. Shortly after, the narrator is rounded up, forced into slavery, and then sold to a wealthy man—his brother. When he is flogged for a minor offense, the narrator calls out his brother’s name, singing a song from their childhood. The two, along with their ancient mother, reunite. Their gladness becomes weeping as they share their stories.
