Throughout the project’s life span, we will regularly publish notes written by team members and guest researchers. These short pieces offer reflections on the methodologies, concepts, findings and experiences of scholars working in environmental humanities and Central African studies. The first research note, written by Prof. Rosa Vieira, is based on her fieldwork in the Mayombe forest of Western DR Congo.
Research Note #1: The Palm Tree’s Cry, by Rosa Vieira
The book The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead’s Town, written by the Nigerian author Amos Tutuola, aroused much controversy when it was first published in 1952. Drawing inspiration from Yoruba tales, the book narrates the adventures of a man who sets off in search of his palm-wine tapster. Before his death, this tapster used to tap the palm tree and supply the narrator with palm wine every day. A seminal work of African literature, its reception provoked disagreements about the work’s literary or anthropological value. As Gail Low (2006) suggests, critics from what was then the colonial metropole, Britain, considered Tutuola’s writing to be authentic literature, an expression of African culture and its beliefs. On the other hand, this appropriation was problematized in West Africa, where some criticized the work for reproducing exotic stereotypes of Africans. Low emphasizes the vital role of the Faber & Faber first edition in producing an original Afro-English by keeping Tutuola’s writing largely unchanged, choosing not to standardize his terms and phrases. The book thus became known for its unusual style of English. In the introduction to the 2014 edition, Wole Soyinka points out how the book invented its own language through an imaginative break with spelling. For example, it transformed the morally charged notion of “drunkard” (a drunk) into “drinkard” (simply a drinker).
The anti-hero starts his story in a tragic-comic tone, without filters or judgments, beginning the book by explaining that he has been a palm-wine drinkard since the age of ten. Because drinking was the only thing he could do, his father gave him a plot of land full of oil palm trees and put a palm-wine tapster at his disposal. But his tapster dies and so the narrator sets off to the land of the dead to find him. As Achille Mbembe and R.H. Mitsch (2003) observe, in the book the drinkard’s self appears as a subject in the process of being made. The work for life, says the authors, consists of capturing death and exchanging it for something else. For Mbembe and Mitsch, the space of the dead is located on the margins of life: “It is a scene where events continually take place that never seem to congeal to the point of consolidating into history. Life unfolds in the manner of a spectacle where past and future are reversed” (2003:6). Through the drinkard, readers encounter a fragmented life, a walk among the dead, in search of a dead person, in the fight against death or against other dead people.
Rather than emphasizing the relationship between life and death made by these authors, here I wish to propose how the palm-wine tapster is a mediator between humans, non-humans and ancestors. Based on my ethnographic research in the Mayombe forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), I suggest that palm wine and oil palm are permeated by life. “Sea never dry, wine never dry” is the title of Wole Soyinka’s introduction to Tutuola’s book (2014). As the Nigerian author says in another short text (Soyinka, 2020), “sea never dry” is a saying found in the local language known as English pidgin or patois. It expresses hope. We might also imagine that so long as there is palm wine, the sea will never dry up. In the forests of the Congo Basin, for example, drinking palm wine allows people to continue to search for life and deal with the adversities they encounter.
Palm wine is a fermented drink that can be extracted from the sap of various palm species. The most typical and well-known in West and Central Africa is extracted from Elaeis guineensis, the African oil palm, a species considered native to these regions. Like palm fruit and oil, this wine has been consumed in Africa for thousands of years. I shared this beverage with drinkers and tappers/tapsters whom I met during my ethnographic research in villages of the Yoómbe, an ethno-linguistic subgroup of the Bacongo, in the Mayombe forest (Vieira, 2021).
In this context, the activity of climbing the palm and extracting palm wine has a practical and highly technical dimension that marks the tapper’s relationship with the plant. In a short Yoómbe story, the main character, the anti-hero Nyimi, receives advice from the village chief about the number of cuts he needs to make at the top of the oil palm to ensure the substance taste good. “You, Nyimi, how many times do you climb the palm tree to get palm wine?” Nyimi replied: “Great chief, twice, once in the morning and once in the afternoon.” The chief listened and then advised him: “Nyimi, your friends and relatives also make another cut when evening comes, so that the palm wine tastes good. But what about you? Why don’t you make the third cut on your palm tree?” According to the story, the protagonist was not following the correct technique. In general, a gourd or plastic bottle should be tied to the top of the palm tree. There, the tapper/tapster needs to make three cuts throughout the day, in the morning, afternoon and evening. These cuts stimulate the palm to release more liquid, which is stored in the gourd or plastic bottle. Other techniques exist for extracting wine, some even from felled oil palm trees. But the most common technique in Mayombe depended on a tapper-plant relationship. The bodies of these two beings modulate each other. The tapper needs to adapt and move his own body in response to the interaction between the hoop that he uses to climb the tree and the oil palm trunk. The latter is also affected by the tapper’s climb. The climbers generally make parallel horizontal cuts all the way up the trunk to form a ladder that facilitates climbing.
Normally, good tappers are also tapsters. Tappers do much more than climb the palm. It is worth emphasizing that “tapster” was another non-typical English term used in Tutuola’s book. According to the Oxford Dictionary, tapster in archaic English means “a man who draws the beer, etc. for the customers in a public house; the keeper of a tavern.” In Tutuola’s adaptation, then, it suggests a kind of barman who offers palm wine. The use of the term tapster in the book makes it clear that the activity of tapping wine involves other roles. He extracts the substance from the multi-species configuration of the forest to be shared in the village.
For the Yoómbe and other African populations, palm wine is appreciated by their ancestors and drinking it is a way of making them present. They also throw some wine on the ground as an offering or to communicate with someone who is no longer part of the world of the living. Bottles or gallons of wine are offered by families during an engagement and consumed at collective events such as weddings and funerals. The substance is also used as an ingredient in traditional medicines, appreciated for its vitality and its capacity to increase strength. It is even given in small quantities to babies. Palm wine thus connects the living, men, women, and children. It constitutes social configurations and produces bodies and persons.
Palm wine is mostly consumed by men on a daily basis. This can be seen in Tutuola’s book. In one excerpt, the narrator laments that his friends no longer visit him because his house has no more palm wine to offer. In the villages of Mayombe, for example, the houses of the palm-wine tapsters are surrounded by men looking for this substance. It is usually shared in groups, both small and large.
Through a relationship with the oil palm, therefore, the tapper/tapster enables a co-substantiality between the plant, humans and ancestors. Could it be that when Tutuola situated the palm-wine tapster in the world of the dead and set the palm-wine drinkard on a never-ending quest for the substance, he foresaw what oil palm would become today? Since the colonial period in Africa and Southeast Asia, the oil palm has been selected, modified and reproduced in monocultures. Today, it is an agro-industrial plant that supports the processed food and cosmetics markets, causing huge damage to forests and local populations. In this process of transformation, tapster and palm-wine have disappeared, just as they did in Tutuola’s book. Yet in many villages in central and western Africa, the oil palm tree continues to weep, and the tapster’s house is surrounded by people looking for the drink.
Bibliographic references:
Low, G. (2006). “The Natural Artist: Publishing Amos Tutuola’s ‘The Palm-Wine Drinkard’ in Postwar Britain.” Research in African Literatures, 37(4), pp. 15-33.
Mbembe, A. (2003). “Life, Sovereignty, and Terror in the Fiction of Amos Tutuola.” Research in African Literatures, 34 (4), pp. 1-26.
Soyinka, W. (2014). “Introduction.” In: Tutuola, A. The Palm-Wine Drinkard. London: Faber & Faber.
Soyinka, W. (2020). “Unsinkable city. Wole Soyinka reflects on a lifetime in Lagos.” Stranger’s guide. The past and future city, Lagos Nigeria. Austin. Available at: https://strangersguide.com/articles/unsinkable-city/ Access date: 14.02.2024.
Tutuola, A. (2014). The Palm-Wine Drinkard. London: Faber & Faber.
Vieira, R. (2021). Huile de palme, personnes et maisons à la forêt du Mayombe (RDC) [Doctoral dissertation, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales]. http://objdig.ufrj.br/72/teses/919074.pdf Access date: 14.02.2024.
Rosa Vieira: a short biography
Rosa C R Vieira is Professor at the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at the University of São Paulo. She was a visiting postdoctoral scholar at the Centre Maurice Halbwachs of the École Normale Supérieur (Paris) and obtained her joint PhD in Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.
She directed the ethnographic short film “Mutsoóngo Malaávu” (The palm-wine tapster), which was selected for various festivals, including the Smithsonian Mother Tongue Film Festival and the Jean Rouch International Festival. It won the best film award at both the Pará International Ethnographic Film Festival and the Cine-plural festival.
Photo credits: Vieira, Rosa. Groupe Mbinga, Mayombe Forest, DRC. October 2019
