There are several moments in Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) where signs of modern life intrude on a tale apparently taking place outside time and space. For example, when the narrator and his second ghost wife have to strip naked to cross a very narrow bridge across a deep valley, they each leave behind a “costly wrist watch”. These are put on by a naked ghost couple heading in the other direction.
But the most striking instance comes towards the end of the novel, when the narrator encounters the Television-Handed Ghostess. This ghost has terrible sores all over her body, which can only be cured if an earthly person agrees to lick them every day for ten years. Our hero is reluctant.
“But when she told me to look at her palm and opened it nearly to touch my face, it was exactly as a television, I saw my town, mother, brother and all my playmates, then she was asking me frequently — ‘do you agree to be licking the sore with your tongue, tell me, now, yes or no?'”
In his foreword to this Grove Press edition Geoffrey Parrinder, a lecturer at University College Ibadan, notes that this Television-Handed Ghostess is “described by a man who has never seen television”. Elsewhere he cites conversations with Tutuola to back up his statements, but this comment is just thrown in. Other writers are happy to repeat it as fact, but I think it’s misleading.
It would be more accurate to say that Tutuola had not watched television. Nigeria was the first sub-Saharan country to introduce TV broadcasting, but that was not until 1959, long after the book was published. And up to that point Tutuola seems not to have travelled outside Africa. But he could easily have seen television in the cinema or in newspapers and magazines.
While American and British films filled the cinemas of Lagos in the 1940s and 1950s, it was rare for them to show the competing medium of television. I can find references to only one or two examples, such as Open Secret in 1948. However a search of the Pathé News and Movietone catalogues indicates that television was covered fairly often in contemporary newsreels.
It even turns up in this 1945 edition of forces newsreel The Gen, in which a happy family watches television in a section on prospects for servicemen after demobilisation. These newsreels were shown overseas, and Tutuola was a craftsman in the RAF in Nigeria from 1942-45. So perhaps…
I also think that the way Tutuola refers to the Television-Handed Ghostess assumes that his readers will know what he is talking about. It seems that the concept, if not the experience, was common enough in Nigeria in the early 1950s.
All of this is a little off my usual beat of cinema in African literature, and it is no surprise to find that the ghosts do not go to the movies in Tutuola’s novel, nor do the ‘deads’ in his debut, The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952). But this passage in the earlier book did catch my eye, from the part where the drinkard is staying with the Faithful Mother in the White Tree.
“The children of seven to eight years etc. of age were always dancing, tapping on the stage with melodious songs and they were also singing with warm tones with non-stop dance til morning. There we saw that all the lights in this hall were in technicolours and they were changing colours at five minutes intervals.”
Technicolour? That has to be from the cinema.
text © Ian Mundell 2015
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