Three Great African Novelists: Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka & Amos Tutuola

African fiction has generally been read against the backdrop of the great tradition of the English novel. This ignores the strong role that African oratures have played in shaping these bicultural texts. This study attempts to correct this imbalance by unraveling the oral strands in the fiction of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Amos Tutuola. It shows that the three novelists from Nigeria give the lie to the myth of a savage Africa created through Western writing by giving us a glimpse of Africa’s rich oral traditions. It traces the Igbo heritage of Achebe and the Yoruba roots of Soyinka and Tutuola to link their return to particular indigenous traditions to their recovery and definition of themselves and their societies. The study uses the tools of folklore, literary analysis and socio-cultural theory to herald a distinctly African form of fiction born of the marriage of folklore and fiction.