The Story Archive

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Amos Tutuola · 1954 CE · Novel · Nigerian · Contemporary

A boy of seven, left behind when a slave raid scatters his village, runs into the bush every child is warned against and cannot find the way back out. He passes through the towns of the ghosts, burnt and smelling and golden in turn, is married among them, is turned into a cow and a horse and back again, and keeps meeting his own dead. Faber brought it out two years after his first book, and the spirit-country it maps is the ground a later Nigerian fiction builds on.

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Genre
Theme
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Hero's Journey (Campbell)
Quest object (Greimas)
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Conflict
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Culture / tradition

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