Nigeria, April 30 -- Listening to Kenyan President William Ruto diss Nigerians with a smile from faraway Italy, one would think he had taken a page from Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard. It was obvious that Ruto assumed Nigerians spoke that variety of unconventional English rendered by Tutuola in his story of magical realism from Yoruba mythology.

Yes, Tutuola's English was neither the Oxford lexicon of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, nor, for that matter, the intense mastery of the Nobel-winning Wole Soyinka. It can be argued, however, that like Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tutuola didn't set out to tell a story like Charles Dickens or George Orwell. But he did tell his story - unbounded, in the Nigerian spirit.

Ruto got so...