[In the following essay, Ngara examines the literary devices p'Bitek uses to express his sense of African nationalism.]

OKOT P'BITEK'S TWO VOICES

Okot p'Bitek is one of the most widely acclaimed African poets. He has been lauded for his successful use of oral forms in his English-language poems. Okot published several major pieces before he died, and, except for Horn of My Love, all of them are called ‘songs’—Song of Lawino, Song of Ocol, Song of Prisoner and Song of Malaya. Perhaps the most successful of these are Song of Lawino¹ and Song of Prisoner². The former is not only the most well-known of his poems but also epitomizes two significant features of the Ugandan poet's work—a serious concern with African culture on the one hand, and, on the other, a lighthearted style. Song of Prisoner is more serious in tone and captures with greater power and beauty something of the tragic aspect of African independence, including what the poet sees as the loss of freedom for the majority of African citizens and the political fortunes of bloodthirsty tyrants on the continent. The anger of those who have lost their freedom is expressed very effectively in the last lines of Section 5 of Song of Prisoner:

I want to drink
Human blood
To cool my heart,
I want to eat
Human liver
To quench my boiling thirst,
I want to smear
Human fat on my belly
And on my forehead.
Mix chyme
With goat blood
And I will drink it,
My inside is full of fire
I must drink
Human blood
To cool me down—.

In the closing lines of the poem there is not only anger but also a devastating sense of frustration and hopelessness which underlies the escapism of the protagonist:

Open the door,
Man,
I want to dance
All the dances of the world,
I want to sleep with
All the young dancers.
I want to dance
And forget my smallness,
Let me dance and forget
For a small while
That I am a wretch,
The reject of my Country,
A broken branch of a Tree
Torn down by the whirlwind
Of Uhuru.

The reader is left in no doubt as to the magnitude of the problem the poet is addressing. The gravity of the subject matter comes out in the serious tenor of discourse that characterizes the poem. The tone of these two passages contrasts sharply with that of the last lines of Section 12 of Song of Lawino, which deals with a very serious subject—the negative effects of neo-colonial education on the educated African elite—but in a very lighthearted manner:

Bile burns my inside!
I feel like vomiting!
For all our young men
Were finished in the forest,
Their manhood was finished
In the class-rooms,
Their testicles
Were smashed
With large books!

This lightheartedness, with which Okot p'Bitek is often associated, is even more pronounced in Song of Malaya, a poem written in a flippant tone, very much in the manner of David Maillu's After 4.30.

We can summarize the foregoing by saying that Okot p'Bitek speaks with two voices—a serious voice and a lighthearted one. There is, however, something common to all his ‘songs’, and that is the use of traditional modes of expression and African imagery. The imagery is typical of the mode of production and thought processes of a precapitalist, peasant society. Okot's imagery is similar to that of Gabriel Okara, but the binary opposition between nature imagery and metaphors derived from modern technology is not as strong in the Ugandan poet as it is in the Nigerian. Even in passages where he is depicting modern life Okot p'Bitek tends to make use of images taken from a traditional set-up. For example, when portraying the new class struggle in independent Africa, in Section 8 of Song of Prisoner, he employs the image of fighting bulls:

Two bulls wrestle
With their horns,
The horn of the ruling bull
Breaks
And he tumbles down
The smooth breast
Of the hill
And plunges
Into the River.

THE ENGLISH AND ACOLI VERSIONS OF SONG OF LAWINO

This brief introduction to Okot p'Bitek provides a perspective for our analysis of his most popular poem, Song of Lawino, on which this chapter is based. The poem is unique in that it was written in both the poet's mother tongue, Acoli, and as an English translation of the Acoli original. In assessing the poet's achievement in Song of Lawino we have to reckon with the fact that we are dealing with a translation, which can only partially capture the poetic qualities, nuances and effectiveness of the Acoli original, Wer pa Lawino. Yet Song of Lawino is not just a literal translation of Wer pa Lawino. It is a poem in its own right, composed and published as such. Whatever strengths and weaknesses the Acoli poem may have cannot be used to judge the merits or demerits of Song of Lawino, although an awareness of the merits of the Acoli original is likely to shed some light on the problems of translation. This is the value of Heron's book on Okot p'Bitek. His comparison of the Acoli and English versions of Song of Lawino is both interesting and illuminating.³

In this connection I should hasten to add that Heron's book gives an exhaustive account of Okot p'Bitek's use of oral traditions. What we are chiefly concerned with in this chapter are the ideological imperatives that motivated Okot to use oral forms, and the effectiveness with which these are integrated into English.

CULTURE, POLITICS AND IDEOLOGY IN SONG OF LAWINO

Song of Lawino is a very rich poem, addressing important issues affecting post-independence Africa. Briefly, the poem is a satirical comment on the neo-colonial mentality of the African petty bourgeoisie—the intellectuals and political leaders of Africa. The target of Lawino's criticism, Ocol, is a representative of this class. He is both an intellectual and a politician, an embodiment of the disease Lawino diagnoses in her song, satirizing the ills of African leaders described elsewhere by Okot in an essay entitled ‘Indigenous Social Ills’, in which he refers to them as ‘culturally barren ladies and gentlemen’.⁴

While Okot is primarily concerned with culture and only marginally with the economic development of Africa, it would not be quite right to suggest that his poems ignore economic problems. In Section 11 of her song, Lawino criticizes Ocol and the African political elite for political ineptitude and economic mismanagement. She lashes out at corruption, pointing out that many politicians joined the campaign for independence for material gain:

Someone said
Independence falls like a bull buffalo
And the hunters
Rush to it with drawn knives,
Sharp shining knives
For carving the carcass.
And if your chest
Is small, bony and weak
They push you off,
And if your knife is blunt
You get the dung on your elbow,
You come home empty-handed
and the dogs bark at you!

Using political power for personal wealth is a common feature of the petty bourgeoisie in developing countries, for in these countries there is no true national bourgeoisie, as in the U. S. A. or Europe, which derives its economic power from ownership of the means of production. Because it is not directly involved in the production of wealth, the African petty bourgeoisie is parasitic. Political power is the only means by which the political elite can acquire substantial wealth. Lawino speaks in Fanonian terms when she says:

The stomach seems to be
A powerful force
For joining political parties,
Especially when the purse
In the trouser pocket
Carries only the coins
With holes in their middle,
And no purple notes
Have ever been folded in it …

Lawino is not blind to the fact that, while politicians are fighting to enrich their own pockets and inter-party strife rages, the common people suffer, for they bear the brunt of the economic problems wrought by the ineptitude of the political elite:

And while the pythons of sickness
Swallow the children
And the buffaloes of poverty
Knock the people down
And ignorance stands there
Like an elephant,
The war leaders
Are tightly locked in bloody feuds,
Eating each other's liver …

This view of the African petty bourgeoisie in control of political power is corroborated by Ocol in Song of Ocol. First, he is so thoroughly colonized that he hates himself for being black:

Africa
This rich granary
Of taboos, customs,
Traditions …
Mother, mother,
Why,
Why was I born
Black?

Accordingly, he and his fellow members of the elite want to destroy all things African, anything that reminds them of their African past. Instead, they will erect monuments to the architects of African colonialism—Bismarck, David Livingstone, Leopold of Belgium and others:

To the gallows
With all the Professors
Of Anthropology
And teachers of African History,
A bonfire
We'll make of their works,
We'll destroy all the anthologies
Of African literature
And close down
All the schools
Of African Studies.

Secondly, Ocol lends weight to Lawino's view that the misdemeanours of African politicians lead to the impoverishment of the workers and peasants. He has the cheek to deny responsibility for the poverty of the peasants, for rampant unemployment, for prostitution and other ills that have come with independence. But it is clear that Okot intends the denial to provide evidence for Lawino's claim. The denial is not convincing:

Do you blame me
Because your sickly children
Sleep on the earth
Sharing the filthy floor
With sheep and goats?
Who says
I am responsible
For the poverty of the peasantry?
Am I the cause of unemployment
And landlessness?
Did you ever see me
Touring the countryside
Recruiting people's daughters
Into prostitution?

There is of course an element of exaggeration, simplification and even unfairness in all this. We know, for instance, that many African leaders will not openly decry African customs and traditions, but pay lip service to African culture by creating such bogus philosophies as ‘authenticity’, empty slogans to befog the people and turn their attention away from real economic and social problems. Alternatively, as in some countries, they can perpetuate an oppressive feudal structure in the name of African tradition. We also know that there are exceptions to the portrait of the African political elite that Okot p'Bitek paints for us. Individuals like Julius Nyerere, Robert Mugabe and Samora Machel, despite their mistakes, genuinely worked for the good of the people in their individual capacities as leaders. In any case we are not blind to the fact that the economic and political destabilization of socialist countries like Mozambique, Angola and Zimbabwe is caused by external forces that do not wish to see genuinely patriotic leaders maintaining political control. However, Okot p'Bitek's poems have identified a serious problem of the African petty bourgeoisie. Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol are in fact footnotes to the warning given by that prophet of the African predicament, Frantz Fanon, who even before a significant number of African nations achieved their independence prophesied the ideological poverty and economic greed of the African ruling class. The following is as good a passage as any to vindicate this claim:

A bourgeoisie similar to that which developed in Europe is able to elaborate an ideology and at the same time strengthen its own power. Such a bourgeoisie, dynamic, educated and secular, has fully succeeded in its undertaking of the accumulation of capital and has given to the nation a minimum of prosperity. In under-developed countries, we have seen that no true bourgeoisie exists; there is only a sort of little greedy caste, avid and voracious, with the mind of a huckster, only too glad to accept the dividends that the former colonial power hands out to it. This get-rich-quick middle class shows itself incapable of great ideas or of inventiveness. It remembers what it has read in European textbooks and imperceptibly it becomes not even the replica of Europe, but its caricature.⁵

Unlike Fanon, however, Okot tends to highlight the cultural element and underplay the economic so that the dominant feature of his authorial ideology can be characterized as cultural nationalism, expressed with feeling and conviction. His is a voice of protest, directed not so much at cultural imperialism as at the African political and intellectual elite that has allowed itself to become the vehicle of neocolonial culture. In a manner which shows his inability to link the behaviour of African leaders to the designs of the international bourgeoisie Okot p'Bitek declares: ‘I believe that most of our social ills are indigenous, that the primary sources of our problems are native. They are rooted in the social set-up.’⁶ This is a clear indication of a limited authorial ideology, of the poet's failure to understand that, while the local political elite contributes to the social and political problems of developing nations, there are other forces, such as imperialism and the international economic order, which play a major role in the political and economic destabilization of these countries.

Be that as it may, Song of Lawino is more than an attack on the colonial mentality of the African petty bourgeoisie. It is also a mine of information on Acoli culture. Lawino is a fundi⁷, she is an expert on Acoli traditions; she compares Acoli culture with western culture; she holds forth on Acoli concepts of time, the significance of Acoli names and Acoli philosophy. Her song contains valuable information for sociologists, anthropologists and students of politics and oral traditions alike. We learn all these things while we are being entertained by her verbal skill, intellectual acumen and wonderful sense of humour. In the next section we shall attempt to account for the manner in which Okot p'Bitek articulates his vision and to comment on how successfully he achieves his goal. In the meantime, we should not overlook that the strong nationalistic sentiments of Song of Lawino are toned down in Song of Prisoner, where the protagonist shows an appreciation of a wide variety of cultures, both African and non-African. In his frustration and misery the protagonist (the prisoner) yearns for the rumba and cha-cha-cha dances as well as the sword dances of the Russians, the beer songs of Germany, the bamboo dance of the Chinese, the rice dance of the Japanese, and so on (pp. 106-108). This seems to indicate that Okot acquired a broader view of culture later in life.

FORM AND COMMUNICATION IN SONG OF LAWINO

The power of Song of Lawino is due in large measure to the author's successful portrayal of an authentic spokesperson, an uneducated woman who has become highly aware of the necessity for her race to preserve its own culture and identity. She is a vivid and memorable character. At first she may appear lighthearted and flippant, but in fact she advances a sound and serious argument. Unlike the Negritude poets she does not overtly claim that African culture is superior to European culture. Her central argument is summed up at the end of Section 2:

Listen Ocol, my old friend,
The ways of your ancestors
Are good,
Their customs are solid
And not hollow
They are not thin, not easily breakable
They cannot be blown away
By the winds
Because their roots reach deep into the soil.
I do not understand
The ways of foreigners
But I do not despise their customs.
Why should you despise yours?

To enable Lawino to advance her argument forcefully Okot gives her the gift of wit and employs Acoli poetic forms to produce a pungent work of satire. She first displays her wit forcefully at the beginning of Section 2, where she makes a mockery of modern notions of beauty, including the use of make-up and cosmetics, by comparing her rival, Clementine, the girl of modern ways, to what in traditional Acoli society must be regarded as the ugliest and most weird of all creatures. That which is considered most beautiful by admirers of European culture is made to appear absurd and grotesque. We shall quote a long passage to show how she builds up her argument:

Ocol is no longer in love with the old type;
He is in love with a modern girl,
The name of the beautiful one
Is Clementine.
Brother, when you see Clementine!
The beautiful one aspires
To look like a white woman;
Her lips are red-hot
Like glowing charcoal,
She resembles the wild cat
That has dipped its mouth in blood,
Her mouth is like raw yaws
It looks like an open ulcer,
Like the mouth of a fiend!
Tina dusts powder on her face
And it looks so pale;
She resembles the wizard
Getting ready for the midnight dance
She dusts the ash-dirt all over her face
And when little sweat
Begins to appear on her body
She looks like the guinea fowl!

We note here that the attack starts as a fairly straightforward factual account of Lawino's husband's preference for a modern girl. Then in the next stanza the tone changes dramatically to a contemptuous one: ‘Brother, when you see Clementine!’. Then the criticism gathers momentum and builds up to a crescendo as we get horrible image after horrible image, in the process of which Clementine is disfigured and transformed from ‘the beautiful one’ into a veritable ‘guinea fowl’. But that is not the end. Before Lawino is done she must demonstrate to us how she is revolted by this monster of a woman and by the soap the monster uses until she, Lawino, is possessed by strange ghosts which make it necessary for a whole ritual to be performed before she can recover:

The smell of carbolic soap
Makes me sick,
And the smell of powder
Provokes the ghosts in my head;
It is then necessary to fetch a goat
From my mother's brother.
The sacrifice over
The ghost-dance drum must sound
The ghost be laid
And my peace restored.

This dramatic reversal of values is not limited to cosmetics and make-up. It is only a prelude to a more generalized attack on European social and cultural values which go against traditional codes of behaviour. Imported forms of dancing, for example, result in immoral behaviour when each man dances with a woman who is not his wife. Apart from being immoral, their kissing and dancing are seen as grotesquely ugly!

You kiss her on the cheek
As white people do,
You kiss her open-sore lips
As white people do,
You suck slimy saliva
From each other's mouths
As white people do.
And the lips of the men become bloody
With blood dripping from the red-hot lips;
Their teeth look
As if they have been boxed in the mouth.

Lawino is not only witty, she is versatile, conjuring up all kinds of images to bring her point home. This talent is coupled with a sense of humour and an ability to admit her weaknesses in a clever way, as in the following passage from Section 2, in which she cunningly confesses that she is jealous of the woman she ostensibly despises:

Forgive me, brother,
Do not think I am insulting
The woman with whom I share my husband!
Do not think my tongue
Is being sharpened by jealousy.
It is the sight of Tina
That provokes sympathy from my heart.

Then the truth comes out:

I do not deny
I am a little jealous
It is no good lying,
We all suffer from a little jealousy.
It catches you unawares
Like the ghosts that bring fevers;
It surprises people
Like earth tremors:
But when you see the beautiful woman
With whom I share my husband
You feel a little pity for her!

We also see her wit at work when she gives an account of the differences between European and African traditions and values. Ostensibly, her argument is that European culture is good for Europeans and African culture good for Africans, but in an apparently objective comparison she uses subtle animal imagery to portray a negative picture of things European and a positive picture of African values. This is particularly striking in Section 5, where the dominant motif is the comparison of the ‘graceful giraffe’, which symbolizes the beauty of the African woman, and the ‘monkey’, which stands for the ugliness of white women and those who ape whites by wearing white people's wigs:

I am proud of the hair
With which I was born
And as no white woman
Wishes to do her hair
Like mine,
Because she is proud
Of the hair with which she was born,
I have no wish
To look like a white woman
No leopard
Would change into a hyena
And the crested crane
Would hate to be changed
Into the bald-headed,
Dung-eating vulture,
The long-necked and graceful giraffe
Cannot become a monkey

In addition to investing Lawino with a witty mind, a sense of humour and a capacity for dramatization, Okot p'Bitek has the ability to make use of traditional tropes and modes of expression in a manner which enriches his poetry and lends it a peculiar freshness. Comparing the modern technological concepts of time with Acoli concepts Lawino describes the Acoli idea of late morning in the following terms:

When the sun has grown up
And the poisoned tips
Of its arrows painfully bite
The backs of the men hoeing
And of the women weeding or harvesting
This is when
You take drinking water
To the workers.

The devices that are most frequently and most effectively used are apostrophe and lampoon.⁸ Apostrophe is the device by which the protagonist or persona directly addresses the interlocutor or the imagined audience. For example, Lawino frequently addresses her husband using such expressions as ‘Listen, my husband’, ‘My husband, Ocol’, ‘Ocol, my friend’. Apostrophe is also frequently used simultaneously with the satirical mode of the lampoon. Lawino addresses her husband directly in the second person and at the same time speaks in a manner which reduces him to the level of a fool. In Section 12 she lampoons Ocol by telling him directly how stupid he is to ape and be subservient to white people. Lawino pleads with her husband, but in a manner that ridicules him:

Listen, my husband,
Hear my cry!
You may not know this
You may not feel so,
But you behave like
A dog of the white man!
A good dog pleases its master,
It barks at night
And hunts in the salt lick
It chases away wild cats
That come to steal the chicken!
And when the master calls
It folds its tail between the legs.
The dogs of white men
Are well trained
And they understand English!
When the master is eating
They lie by the door
And keep guard
While waiting for left-overs.
But oh! Ocol
You are my master and husband,
You are the father of these children
You are a man,
You are you!
Do you not feel ashamed
Behaving like another man's dog
Before your own wife and children?

Section 12, from which the above quotation is taken, constitutes the climax of Lawino's argument and demonstrates Okot p'Bitek's use of apostrophe. The section falls into three major subsections if we go by Lawino's subject matter and her audience. In the first subsection Lawino addresses her clansmen. The subject matter is her husband's ‘dark forest of books’:

Listen, my clansmen,
I cry over my husband
Whose head is lost.
Ocol has lost his head
In the forest of books.

This, as we shall see, is at the heart of her argument. In the second subsection she addresses Ocol in the words quoted above and does not mention books at all. Then she ends the section by going back to address the clansmen and returning to the subject of books. In the last section, Section 13, her whole approach, manner and tone of voice change: she tones down the bitterness in her voice and instead of lampooning her husband she cajoles him, coaxes him like a loving wife, even advising him to buy clothes, beads and perfumes ‘for the woman / With whom I share you’. She assumes the role of both a teacher and a loving wife. In Section 13 she does not address her clansmen at all. In Section 12, however, her clansmen occupy the centre of the stage in her address. They are her primary audience as she expounds her views on the danger of books. Using apostrophe and other traditional tropes Lawino deals a deadly blow to the educated elite that has imbibed western bourgeois culture through exposure to books written in the West. Whereas books are ordinarily regarded as a source of knowledge and enlightenment, Lawino likens the large volumes of books in her husband's study to a dark and deadly forest:

My husband's house
Is a mighty forest of books,
Dark it is and very damp,
The steam rising from the ground
Hot thick and poisonous
Mingles with the corrosive dew
And the rain drops
That have collected in the leaves

This mighty forest is indeed a deadly one for the books ‘choke you / if you stay there long’. So poisonous are they that ‘the boiling darkness / Bursts your eye balls’ and blocks your sense of hearing as well. So the description goes on in a manner which can make readers and critics of Okot p'Bitek miss the centrality of this section to Lawino's argument. She sounds naive or even flippant, but in actual fact Okot is using a very sophisticated device. In what is only superficially a naive comparison, Lawino goes on to associate death with the books in her husband's house because, as she says, the books were written by dead white men and women. So she claims that the ‘ghosts’ of the dead men and women who wrote these books have ‘captured’ her husband and will capture and destroy anybody who stays too long in the house:

If you stay
In my husband's house long,
The ghosts of the dead men
That people this dark forest,
The ghosts of the many white men
And white women
That scream whenever you touch any book,
The deadly vengeance ghosts
Of the writers
Will capture your head,
And like my husband
You will become
A walking corpse.

This is a simple but effective way of explaining how African intellectuals who are educated in western-type schools become helpless victims of neo-colonialism in the same way as people who entered a dangerous forest in traditional society fell prey to the ghosts of dead people. We notice here that what the ghosts in Ocol's dark forest of books are keen to capture is the ‘head’ of the victim, which means the mind. Okot p'Bitek is analysing the malady of a social class of which Ocol is a representative. This class has been emptied of all its African cultural values by imbibing western culture. It is because of her sense of the devastating effects of this alien culture on her husband that, using apostrophe in a most dramatic way, Lawino calls upon all her clansmen to come and mourn her ‘dead’ husband:

O, my clansmen
Let us all cry together!
Come,
Let us mourn the death of my husband,
The death of a Prince
The Ash that was produced
By a great Fire!
O, this homestead is utterly dead,
Close the gates
With lacari thorns,
For the Prince
The heir to the Stool is lost!

But at this juncture Lawino comes into the open and makes it clear that she is not only concerned about her husband. Her concern is for the entire social class to which Ocol belongs. To draw her argument to a close she employs the traditional conceit of young men losing their manhood in the forest. This time it is the dark forest of books that has done the deed:

For all our young men
Were finished in the forest,
Their manhood was finished
In the class-rooms,
Their testicles
Were smashed
With large books!

In this way, through the use of apostrophe, lampoon, Acoli expressions and other devices both oral and modern, Okot creates a memorable satirical touchstone in Song of Lawino for the rest of African poetry.

CONCLUSION

We must not, however, exaggerate Okot p'Bitek's success, for Song of Lawino is not without shortcomings. One of these is that it is uneven, parts of it being dull and flat. For example, parts of Section 4, where Lawino boasts about having been the leader of girls in her younger days, are quite tedious. The weakness of the poem in this regard becomes even more apparent when it is compared with Song of Prisoner, whose density of texture is sustained throughout and whose language is packed with emotion and feeling.

Some of the traditional modes of expression Okot employs in Song of Lawino do not come off—at least for those readers who do not understand Acoli. In this connection, the proverb which says ‘the pumpkin in the old homestead should not be uprooted’ occurs frequently, and is clearly meant to play a key role in conveying Lawino's message. But to the author of this book, to whom Acoli is a strange language, the proverb conveys little or no meaning. This is also true of some of Okot's imagery. Consider, for instance, the following lines from Section 2 where Lawino introduces the conceit of Clementine as the woman with whom she shares her husband:

Her body resembles
The ugly coat of the hyena;
Her neck and arms
Have real human skins
She looks as if she has been struck
By lighting;
Or burnt like the Kongoni
In a fire hunt.

This is far from being as effective as the description of Clementine which occurs at the beginning of the same section and which was quoted earlier in the chapter.

There are also some inconsistencies and contradictions in Song of Lawino. As a character, Lawino sometimes gets out of hand and Okot is not able to control her and shape her plausibly. What Lawino says in Section 11 is out of character. Her analysis of the behaviour of politicians in Uganda is so sophisticated that one wonders whether she is the same woman who is at one time amazed at the ticking of Ocol's clock (Section 7). In Section 11 Lawino does not strike the reader as a simple woman commenting in a simple way about political rivalry. Naturally, I am not suggesting that peasants cannot be political analysts. They can in fact be more revolutionary than the intelligentsia; but the problem here is that Okot presents us with a seemingly simple peasant woman and then turns her into a political scientist without creating the circumstances that give rise to such a transformation.

From the point of view of the flow of the verse, Song of Lawino is not particularly well constructed. The poetry is much too rugged and devoid of lyrical qualities. Okot p'Bitek was not entirely successful in employing such devices as alliteration and repetition which could have made his poetry more pleasant to the ear. There are, however, instances of the effective use of such devices, especially in Song of Prisoner. In Song of Lawino too, one can cite Section 11, where repetition and parallelism help to quicken the pace of the verse, as in the following passage:

The women yodel
And make ululation!
They yodel and make ululation
Not because they understand,
They yodel so that their voices may be heard
So that their secret lovers may hear them,
They shout and make ululations
Because they are tired
Tired of the useless talk
Tired of the insults
And the lies of
The speakers.

All said and done, however, we can justifiably say that Okot p'Bitek's achievement in Song of Lawino is unparalleled in African poetry to date. Using traditional modes of expression and tropes he created a powerful and memorable poem in the medium of English. His achievement becomes more significant if we take into account the fact that he communicates even more effectively in the Acoli language, the language of the peasant community that gave him the inspiration to champion the cause of African culture. In this poem Okot successfully resolved the problem of the contradiction between the writer's medium and his audience. He cannot be accused of elitism because he speaks directly to the Acoli masses in their own language and is at the same time able to communicate with all those who understand English the world over. Okot p'Bitek's art is an example of that rare phenomenon: popular art which appeals to the highly educated while being intelligible to the common man and woman in the street.

Notes

1. This chapter is based on the combined edition Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, Nairobi, East African Publishing House, 1972. There is now a Heinemann edition of the same volume. The two poems were first published in 1966 and 1967 respectively.

2. All the references to Song of Prisoner and Song of Malaya in this chapter are from Okot p'Bitek, Two Songs, Nairobi, East African Publishing House, 1971.

3. G. A. Heron, The Poetry of Okot p'Bitek, London, Heinemann Educational Books, 1976.

4. See Okot p'Bitek, Africa's Cultural Revolution, Nairobi, Macmillan, 1973, p. 13.

5. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967, p. 141.

6. See Africa's Cultural Revolution, pp. 6-7.

7. A Hindi word current in East Africa, meaning ‘maker’ or ‘expert’.

8. See Heron, op. cit., Chapter 2.