You’ve probably heard of the "hero’s journey." Joseph Campbell made it famous, and George Lucas turned it into a billion-dollar space opera. But then there is the nightmare journey. It’s messy. It’s hallucinatory. It’s basically what happens when you take every rule of Western storytelling and throw it into a West African blender. I’m talking about My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
When Amos Tutuola published this thing in 1954, people didn't know what to do with it. Critics in London were fascinated but also kinda patronizing. They called it "primitive." They were wrong. It wasn’t primitive; it was a radical, terrifyingly modern break from reality that still feels more "punk" than most fantasy novels hitting the shelves today.
The Story Most People Get Wrong
Basically, the plot kicks off with a young boy—maybe seven years old—who is fleeing from slave raiders. He’s scared. He’s small. In his panic, he runs straight into the "Bush of Ghosts." This isn't just a forest with some spooky shadows. It’s an overlapping dimension where the laws of physics and biology just sort of quit.
He stays there for twenty-five years.
Think about that. This isn't a weekend trip to Narnia. It’s a quarter-century of being transformed into different animals, getting married to ghosts, and suffering through some of the most creative tortures ever put to paper. One of the biggest misconceptions about My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is that it’s a simple collection of folk tales. It isn't. Tutuola was doing something much more psychological. He was writing about the trauma of displacement.
Why the Language Freaked Everyone Out
Tutuola wrote in what some call "Young English." It’s a rhythmic, fragmented, and highly idiosyncratic version of the language. To some early British reviewers, it looked like he just didn't know the rules of grammar.
They missed the point.
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The prose in My Life in the Bush of Ghosts creates a sense of vertigo. By breaking the "proper" English of the colonial era, Tutuola mirrored the broken world his protagonist was trapped in. You’ve got sentences that loop back on themselves. You’ve got descriptions of creatures like the "Television-handed Ghostess."
Wait, what?
Yeah. In 1954, Tutuola was writing about a ghost with a television in her palm. This is years before most people in Nigeria even had a TV set. It’s a brilliant example of how he blended traditional Yoruba folklore with the creeping onset of modern technology. He was a surrealist before the word was even cool in literary circles.
The Brian Eno Connection
If you aren't a bookworm, you might recognize the title from the 1981 album by Brian Eno and David Byrne. Honestly, that album is a masterpiece of found-sound and worldbeat experimentation, but it almost didn't happen because of the title.
Eno and Byrne basically "borrowed" the name from Tutuola’s book. They liked the vibe. They liked the idea of a "bush of ghosts" being this dense, electronic thicket of sound. However, they initially forgot to clear the rights properly. It caused a bit of a stir, and eventually, they had to give Tutuola his credit. The album captures the feeling of the book—disorienting, layered, and strange—even if it doesn't follow the plot.
The Ghosts Aren't Just Ghosts
In this world, "ghosts" are anything that isn't quite human or is "beyond."
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- There are ghosts that are literally just smells.
- There are ghosts made of copper.
- There are "burglar ghosts" who steal things just because it’s their nature.
It’s an exhausting world. The protagonist is constantly being captured, sold, or forced into labor. This is where the E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) of Tutuola’s background comes in. He wasn't some university-educated elite writing from a high tower. He was a man who had worked as a blacksmith and a clerk. He knew what it felt like to be a cog in a machine.
When he writes about the "Deads' Town," he isn't just being spooky. He’s describing a bureaucracy. The dead have their own rules, their own taxes, and their own complicated social hierarchies. It’s a satire of the colonial administration he saw every day in Nigeria.
Why It’s Not Actually "Fantasy"
We like to put books in boxes. We see monsters and magic and say, "Okay, this is fantasy." But My Life in the Bush of Ghosts resists that.
Scholars like Achille Mbembe or even the legendary Chinua Achebe have wrestled with Tutuola’s legacy. Achebe, for instance, had a complicated relationship with Tutuola's work. At first, many African intellectuals were worried that Tutuola's "broken" English would make Westerners think Africans were uneducated.
But as time went on, the perspective shifted. They realized Tutuola was a rebel. He wasn't trying to write like Dickens or Hardy. He was reclaiming the right to be weird.
A Lesson in Resilience
The most striking thing about the book isn't the monsters. It’s the fact that the kid survives. He grows up in a place where literally everything is trying to eat him, change him, or forget him.
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He eventually finds his way out, but he’s not the same person. He’s "half-ghost" in his mind. He’s seen too much. This is the reality of many people who survive war or long-term trauma. You can go home, but you can’t really "go back."
How to Approach This Story Today
If you’re going to dive into My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, don't look for a traditional three-act structure. You won't find it.
Instead, look for the rhythm. Read it out loud. You'll start to hear the influence of oral storytelling. In Yoruba culture, stories aren't just told; they are performed. Tutuola managed to trap that performance inside a book.
It’s also worth checking out the 1960s editions with illustrations if you can find them. The visual interpretations of the ghosts are often as wild as the text itself.
Actionable Takeaways for Readers and Writers
If you want to understand why this book still matters, do these things:
- Read it as a Dream Journal. Don't try to make logical sense of why one ghost turns into a tree. Dreams don't have logic; they have "emotional truth." That’s what Tutuola is mining.
- Compare it to Modern African Futurism. Look at writers like Nnedi Okorafor or Marlon James. You can see the DNA of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in their work. They owe him a huge debt for opening the door to non-Western structures.
- Listen to the Eno/Byrne Album. After you read a few chapters, put on the track "Help Me Somebody." The layers of radio voices and funk beats will suddenly make a lot more sense.
- Challenge Your Own Grammar. If you’re a writer, try writing a page where you ignore "proper" English and focus entirely on how the words sound. It’s harder than it looks.
Amos Tutuola died in 1997, but his "bush" is still growing. It’s a reminder that the best stories aren't the ones that follow the rules. They’re the ones that create a whole new world and then dare you to survive it.