SOURCE: Heron, G. A. “Introduction.” In Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, by Okot p'Bitek, pp. 1-33. London and Ibadan: Heinemann, 1984.

[In the following introduction to p'Bitek's Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, Heron discusses the effects of translation on p'Bitek's poetry as well as details of the poems themselves.]

African writers who choose to use English or French set themselves certain problems. They wish to express African ideas, but they have chosen a non-African tool to express them. There is a grave danger that with the tool of language they will borrow other foreign things. Every language has its own stock of common images expressing a certain people's way of looking at things. Every language has its own set of literary forms which limit a writer's manner of expression. How many of these tools can a writer borrow before his African ideas are affected by the influence of foreign ideas implied in them?

The first few African writers in colonial countries were not concerned with this problem. They simply imitated and praised their conquerors.¹ But this group was small, short-lived and insignificant. Ever since the idea of ‘negritude’ emerged in the 1940s among French-speaking writers² most African writers have been conscious of the dangers. They have tried in various ways to mould European languages and forms so that they could express African ideas. The ‘negritude’ writers based their poems on images taken from African traditions. Chinua Achebe, one of the earliest successful English speaking writers, uses the European novel form, but he is very careful to create an ‘Africanised’ English for the dialogue of his characters.³

Despite these efforts, many European influences are present in African writing and in the criticism of African writing. Sadly, the written literature of the African nations has been clearly separated in many people's minds from the oral literary heritage that is present in every African community. Comparisons have more often been made between African poems and European poems than between African poems and traditional songs. Fortunately this emphasis is now changing.

Okot p'Bitek compels us to make comparisons between his poems and traditional songs. The title ‘Song of …’ that he has given to all his poems suggests the comparison. He used many features borrowed from traditional songs in the writing of Song of Lawino. Partly because of the familiarity of these features to all Africans, Song of Lawino has become one of the most successful African literary works. Some African writers have been read mainly by a small well-educated elite. Okot succeeded in reaching many people who rarely show an interest in written literature, while still winning praise from the elite for his poems.

This success seems remarkable if we consider the fact that some publishers rejected this poem only a few years before this achievement. These rejections probably came mainly from the publishers' familiarity with European rather than African forms of literature. But the idea of a long poem is now a rather strange one in either tradition. Few poets use long poems now. Again Song of Lawino does not fit into any Western model for a long poem. It is not an epic poem, it is not a narrative poem, it is not the private meditations of the poet. This written ‘Song’ form was born in Uganda while Okot was writing Song of Lawino.

If there was now only one ‘Song’, we could perhaps discount this originality of form as an insignificant accident. Okot, however, continued to write even longer poems. Song of Ocol, Song of Prisoner and Song of Malaya are all in similar form to Song of Lawino. In addition, two other writers were sufficiently impressed by Song of Lawino to write their own ‘Songs’. Joseph Buruga in The Abandoned Hut is strongly influenced by Okot, and Okello Oculi in Orphan and Malak is experimenting in different ways to use long poems in English in an African way to express African emotions and problems. It is interesting to look further at these ‘Songs’ to see why they have made an impact.

An equally important reason for the success of these poems is the controversial issues that they raise. In some circles in East Africa, the words Lawino and Ocol have become common nouns. You will hear the ‘Ocols’ or the ‘Lawinos’ of Africa praised or condemned in many arguments. The two characters have become prototypes of two opposing approaches to the cultural future of Africa. You will have your own opinions in this debate and after you have enjoyed these poems you will be able to make up your own mind about the relevance of Okot's contribution to it. This introduction contains a short biography of the writer and a consideration of the influence of Acoli songs on Song of Lawino. Then I discuss some details of the form and imagery of the two poems. Finally I try to suggest some issues raised by the poems which may be discussed.

INFLUENCE OF SONGS AND EFFECT OF TRANSLATION

Okot wrote the Acoli version of Song of Lawino in a period in his life when he was daily concerned with Acoli traditional songs, both in his research and in his activities in connection with the Gulu Festival. In his work for the Festival, he co-operated very closely with a large group of friends. These are some of the people whose help he acknowledged on the title pages of Song of Lawino. Naturally when Okot was writing his poem he also worked together with these friends. He read new versions of each chapter of the poem to these people as soon as they were completed, and their comments were taken into account if the chapter needed rewriting. Thus even its method of composition is similar to that of traditional songs. A group of singers work together and continuously alter the songs as they perform them.

Other elements link the poem to traditional songs. In most parts of the poem, Lawino addresses herself to someone, for example: ‘Husband’ (p. 34), ‘my clansmen’ (p. 35), ‘Brother’ (p. 37). This form of address is a rhetorical device taken straight from Acoli oral literature. Another feature used a lot in Wer pa Lawino and sometimes also occurring in the translation is the use of a repeated phrase as a refrain, emphasising an important idea. There is a good example of this in Chapter 3:

Timme ducu lutimme Munu-Munu
Ping'o lewic pe mako Munu,
Lukwako dako atyer, calo Munu
Luting'o pong' kor, calo Munu
Wumato taa cigara, calo Munu,
Wa mon, wa co calo Munu;
Wunato lem-wu calo Munu,
Wunato dog-wu calo Munu,
Wunango laa dogwu calo Munu,
Ma dog co nywak ki reng'ng'e pa Munu.(7)

In the English version this repetition is considerably reduced:

You kiss her on the cheek
As white people do,
You kiss her open-sore lips
As white people do
You suck the slimy saliva
From each other's mouths
As white people do.

(p. 44)

This translates only three lines of the original. In the translation of the other lines the refrain is missed out. This repetition can be used over a few lines, as in this example, or to tie together a whole chapter. The repetition of this phrase strongly emphasises the idea of slavish imitation which Lawino finds so ridiculous in the dance.

The whole of the poem is tied together by a similar refrain. It is taken from an Acoli proverb. In Wer pa Lawino it reads:

Te Okono obur bong' luputu.(8)

Okot's translation is:

The pumpkin in the old homestead
Must not be uprooted!

(p. 41)

Pumpkins are a luxury food. They grow wild throughout Acoliland. To uproot pumpkins, even when you are moving to a new homestead, is simple wanton destruction. In this proverb, then, Lawino is not asking Ocol to cling to everything in his past, but rather not to destroy things for the sake of destroying them. Again, the refrain is used to emphasise an important idea the writer is putting across in the whole poem.

The most important influence Acoli songs have had on Song of Lawino is in the imagery Okot uses. Okot has completely avoided the stock of common images of English literature through his familiarity with the stock of common images of Acoli literature. In the English version, this gives his poem a feeling of freshness for every reader, and a sense of Africanness for African readers. One place where these images are found in the poem are in the quotations for songs that are set out as quotations in the text. There are examples of these on pages 60; 62; 66-7; 76-8; 98; 101; 115; 120. These songs often convey Lawino's feelings more fully than her own words. The song on page 83, for example, expresses the sorrow in the names of sadness very clearly:

Fate has brought troubles
Son of my mother
Fate has thrown me a basket,
It all began as a joke
Suffering is painful
It began before I was born.

More important than these are the innumerable places where Lawino's own words echo the words of a traditional song. If we look at a few lines of Song of Lawino next to a few lines from an Acoli song, we can see this clearly:

Beg forgiveness from them
And ask them to give you
A new spear
A new spear with a sharp and
          hard point
A spear that will crack the
          rock
Ask for a spear that you will
          trust

(p. 119)

The spear with the hard point
Slits the granite rock
The spear that I trust
Penetrates the granite rock
The hunter has slept in the
          wilderness
I die oh,(9)

Through his thorough knowledge of an African literary tradition Okot has succeeded in using English as a tool to reach a wider audience without borrowing foreign elements that distort his message.

All but a very few lines of Song of Lawino were written in Acoli originally and later translated into English. For most parts of the poem, the translation was an afterthought. When Okot was trying to publish the Acoli version, he translated a small extract for a writer's conference in Nairobi. The enthusiastic reception of this persuaded him to translate the whole poem. Song of Ocol was also an afterthought. Lawino was an unsuitable spokesman for one or two of Okot's comments on the East African scene. Song of Ocol was needed to add this extra dimension. Song of Ocol was written in English throughout; there is no Acoli version.

Okot's ‘Songs’ are not songs in any literal sense. You cannot sing them. They are not simply a written version of Acoli songs. Acoli songs do not grow to book length. They are one or two verses repeated with musical accompaniment. They are not written down under one person's authorship. They are sung and adapted by singer after singer, and each singer is free to create in his own way and change the song to fit current events or refer to his own girl-friend. They do not use rhyme or the regular rhythm used in Wer pa Lawino.

So it is possible to exaggerate the influence of Acoli tradition on Okot's poems. From western tradition he takes the idea of individual authorship, of spoken verse, of rhyme, of division into chapters, of the printed word. But many of the aspects that give them their impact are those aspects which are a direct continuation of his people's own tradition. Okot has adapted a traditional form to new conditions of performance, rather than created a new form.

The writer chose to make a very literal translation of Song of Lawino. The main differences between the two versions are the rearrangement of the order of certain sections within the chapters, the filling out of some descriptions of things unfamiliar to readers of the English version, and the dropping from the English version of some details which are in the Acoli original. There is no doubt that, as Taban lo Liyong has said:

the meaning of deep Acoli proverbs are made very light by their rendition into English word for word, rather than sense for sense, or proverb for proverb.¹⁰

Certain areas of meaning are lost through this kind of translation. If we take the lines:

The pumpkin in the old homestead
Must not be uprooted …

(p. 41)

it is obvious that, even after an explanation, non-Acoli readers will not feel the force of the proverb as Acoli readers would. And the poem is full of such references to songs, carrying meanings that have been built up over years of familiarity with the words. It is possible that with a longer, less literal, translation some of this meaning could have been retained, but the result would have been very cumbersome.

But the advantages of Okot's method outweigh these disadvantages. As I have pointed out, many African writers using English or French have attempted to ‘Africanise’ these languages. Okot p'Bitek has succeeded in this more than any other previous writer. A less literal translation would have involved the intrusion of foreign elements into his poem. It is true that Okot's ‘Acoli-English’¹¹ carries deeper meaning to Acoli readers than to others, but it is rarely obscure for Africans.

There are occasions when Okot deliberately adds strangeness in the translation which is not there in the original. The most obvious example of this is in Chapter 8. Instead of using the biblical terms, ‘gospel’, ‘Holy Ghost’, ‘God’, Okot gives us a literal retranslation of the Acoli translation of these words. So we have: ‘good word’ (p. 73), ‘clean ghost’ (p. 74) and strangest of all ‘the Hunchback’ (p. 75). Here the English version carries the strangeness of these words to Lawino when she first heard them more strongly than the Acoli version. Most Acoli readers will be familiar with the Christian meaning of these terms and will not find them strange at all.

If we look at the first few pages of Chapter 4 (p. 47), we can see a more normal example of Okot's translation working well. The first 74 lines of this chapter (up to: “Should they open it / So that the pus may flow out?’) correspond more or less exactly in ideas to the first 49 lines of the Acoli version. One or two details in the description of the house and the abuse of Ocol that are in the original are missing in the translation. The arrangement of the passage has also been slightly changed. The Acoli version uses ‘diro me Acoli’ or ‘ryeko me Acoli’ (the skill or wisdom of the Acoli)¹² as a refrain in a very tight description of the home. This repetition is missing from the English version, and the description is filled out with a little explanation, as the scene is unfamiliar to non-Acoli readers.

Okot leaves two words untranslated: ‘Lyonno and nyadyang’. These give the passage a feeling of strangeness without making it difficult to understand. The passage contains a quotation from a song:

Father prepare the kraal etc.

(p. 48)

and also an image borrowed from another song:

And my name blew
Like a horn
Among the Payira.

(p. 48)

Okot does not explain the reference to the expected bride-price of cattle but this will present no difficulty to Africans. In this section, Okot gets the advantages of a literal translation with very little loss of meaning.

VERSE

In Song of Lawino Okot replaces the regular rhythm and rhyme of the Acoli version with irregular free verse in the English version. His lines in Song of Lawino usually end with a strong emphasis. He builds his lines around the words he wants to emphasise, crowding weaker words into the beginning of the line:

They mould the tips of the cotton nests
So that they are sharp
And with these they prick
The chests of their men

(p. 39)

This gives a staccato effect to his verse. This can be clumsy, but it sometimes successfully underlines Lawino's contemptuous moods:

He just shouts
Like house-flies
Settling on top of excrement
When disturbed.

(p. 49)

The arrangement of the verse suits Lawino's feelings.

Sometimes Okot successfully softens these lines to convey Lawino's wistful moods. The section from the beginning of Chapter 4 illustrates this. While she remembers Ocol's wooing of her and the beauty of her home, Lawino's voice takes on a note of nostalgia (p. 47). The staccato effect of the lines is reduced in sympathy. There are soft sounds ending many of the lines, for example: ‘briskly’, ‘lily’, ‘cattle’, ‘silently’. The lines flow smoothly to express Lawino's gentler mood.

In Song of Ocol the emphatic stresses at the end of Okot's lines are replaced by much more varied patterns of stress. The lines are shorter and Okot often misses out structural words which sometimes crowd out the lines in Song of Lawino. Okot also makes very effective use of one or two syllable lines to provide shock changes of pace. This changes the staccato effect into a lively bouncing rhythm:

You sister
From Pokot
Who grew in the open air
You are fresh …
Ah!
Come,
Walk with me …

(p. 138)

Song of Ocol is very easy to read aloud. In this poem Okot shows himself to be a master of English free verse.

The language and imagery of Song of Ocol lack the references to oral tradition which give Song of Lawino some of its richness, but Okot shows himself well able to create his own imagery. One source of pleasure in the poem is the poet's evident delight in the use of words. The images crowd on top of one another so that the reader's imagination is feasted on a succession of vivid pictures:

Mad creature
Her hair
A burnt out forest
Her eyes
Shooting out from the head
A pair of rockets
Serpent tongues
Spitting poison
Lashing crocodile tail …

(p. 127)

THE CHARACTER OF LAWINO

The character of Lawino dominates Song of Lawino and it is important for you to consider how successful Okot's portrait of her is. The poem is based on a real social problem, very common in rural areas in East Africa. Many wives have seen their husbands move out of the range of their education and experience through travel. Many ‘Ocols’ return home with nothing but contempt for the ways of their parents and their wives. What we need to consider is whether Lawino's response to this situation is ‘real’. Does she react in the way we would expect women in such a situation to react?

To consider her character, we can divide the poem fairly easily into three sections. In the first five chapters Lawino is a perfect portrait of a woman scorned. She lashes out at Ocol, who used to admire her, and Clementine, who has usurped her place, indiscriminately. Then Tina disappears. In Chapters 6 to 11, Lawino seems much less concerned with her personal plight. She defends the customs of her ancestors with more and more profound comparisons between Western and Acoli ways. The last two chapters tie the concerns of the other two sections together. Lawino's desire to win back Ocol's admiration is combined with a commentary on the whole Acoli community and an appeal for the renewal of traditional ways.

I find the Lawino of the first five chapters extremely credible. She is not jealous of Clementine in the narrow sense of desiring to have sole possession of Ocol. She is familiar with polygamy, she knows no other form of marriage. She is simply mystified and annoyed that Ocol prefers a woman who is no younger than her and can match her in none of her womanly accomplishments. Her mystification finds expression in wistful descriptions of her own beauty, and her annoyance in abuse of everything she has seen or heard of Ocol's new way of life.

I think the sudden disappearance of Tina weakens the portrait of Lawino a little. I think it is this slight change in emphasis which has led some critics to make a distinction between Lawino as the woman scorned and Lawino as the defender of Acoli customs. In his review of Wer pa Lawino Okumu pa Lukobo says:

In choosing as his text Ter okon bong' luputu (Don't uproot the pumpkin) I think Bitek has made a mistake. What Lawino has to say would have been better expressed by another Acoli proverb which says Dako abila ni eye meni (Your first wife is your mother). For what Lawino is really concerned with is a personal matter—her rivalry with her husband's mistress Kelementina.¹³

This seems to me to be a misunderstanding of a very common feature of literature. Both oral and written literatures often operate at the same time on different levels of meaning. A domestic situation may be used by a singer or a writer to make a political comment. I see no contradiction between Lawino as an offended first wife and Lawino as the defender of Acoli values.

In fact, I think that a great deal of the appeal of Song of Lawino comes from Okot's exploitation of the dramatic possibilities of Lawino's rivalry with Clementine. Other writers have satirised aspects of life together or appealed to such a wide audience. Part of this success is due to the credibility of his portrait of Lawino.

Nevertheless, by allowing Tina to disappear completely from the poem, Okot gives some slight justification to these critics. But it should be pointed out that Lawino is concerned mainly to attack Ocol, and that Ocol is very clearly present in every part of the poem. Unlike Ocol in Son of Ocol, she doesn't shift from attacks on one group of people to attacks on another. Throughout the poem she is mocking Ocol. The domestic situation and the character of Lawino in themselves provide a fairly consistent level of meaning in the poem. This level of meaning contributes to the success of Okot's more serious aims in the poem.

LAWINO AS SPOKESMAN

If Song of Lawino were no more than a good picture of a woman from an Acoli village it would not have attracted all the attention that has been devoted to it in the few years since its publication. Lawino is the writer's tool for making his own comments on the way people behave in East Africa. At first sight it may seem that he has chosen a very bad tool. Certainly Taban lo Liyong, when he wrote The Last Word, thought so. He wrote:

Africans have been mad at expatriates for taking the African houseboy as the representative African. Okot hasn't done better by letting a mere catechist criticise the West and Westernisation. … The trouble with his method is that his discussion is conducted in a low key; it is the simple that he deals with … things to be seen with the eyes, things to be heard with the ears, or felt with the skin—but little to be felt with the intellect.¹⁴

There is some truth in this. One of the reasons why Ocol's reply was necessary is that Okot couldn't say all he wanted to through Lawino because of her limited experience.

However, Lawino manages remarkably well. Because she is not intellectual, it does not mean she is not intelligent. Though she always uses simple language, as we shall see, she raises most of the issues about Westernisation that an intellectual might have raised. More important, Lawino's ignorance enables Okot to do something which more intellectual poems failed to do.

In his book African Religions in Western Scholarship, Okot talks of the ‘systematic and intensive use of dirty gossip’¹⁵ by Western scholars in describing the ways of life of Africans. Whether or not Okot is scrupulously fair to all Western scholars, it is clear that much of the disruption and cruelty of colonial rule was made possible by white men's ignorance of African ways of living and their preparedness to accept the tales they invented round their dinner tables as the truth. The sad thing is that some Africans still exaggerate ridiculous aspects of traditional ways without acknowledging valuable aspects of them.

To a considerable extent, Lawino uses ‘dirty gossip’ against her enemies. Because she is not ‘intellectual’ she lacks the ability imaginatively to project herself into Western culture which African intellectuals, through their enforced exposure to Western education, usually possess. In relation to Western culture she is a complete outsider. Even a character like the house servant in Oyono's Houseboy, though he eventually violently rejects it, has much more sympathy with Western culture than Lawino. Because of this, Lawino is free to turn the Western weapon of ‘dirty gossip’ back on its users. It is natural for her to express the prejudices of her people. And these prejudices are simply the negative expression of her positive beliefs. By using Lawino, Okot is able to present Acoli ideas without the awareness of the other side's case which hampers some of the more intellectual approaches.

Lawino is not unfair to Europeans. She is not trying to impose her set of beliefs on them. She is using her prejudices in an argument with other Africans within Africa. But she is unreasonable in some of her criticism of Clementine and Ocol. Some of her comments are little more than scandal-mongering. For example, in Chapter 2, when she first attacks Clementine, the climax of her abuse is:

Perhaps she has aborted many!
Perhaps she has thrown her twins
In the pit latrine!

(p. 39)

The word ‘perhaps’ shows that Lawino is simply spreading a tale against Clementine. Again some of her accusations against Ocol are a little unlikely. She says:

Perhaps you are covering up
Your bony hips and chest
And the large scar on your thigh
And the scabies on your buttocks.

(p. 50)

The word ‘perhaps’ is there again.

Even through this kind of abuse Lawino is expressing aspects of African tradition. Abortion is now legal in some Western countries. The concern with population control in those countries outweights the dislike most people feel for the operation. With the African attitude to the event of birth and and the respect of all traditions for large familes, the whole idea of abortion in any circumstances is abhorrent. Again, in a soceity where very few clothes are normally worn, the only people who cover themselves are those who are ashamed of their bodies.

This abuse is another factor which links Song of Lawino to traditional literature. One function that traditional songs and stories sometimes fulfil is to enable members of a family or community to step outside the normal restraints which their family roles impose on what they say to one another. In a song, the singer is free to use mockery to criticise the conduct of other members of the community, and especially to deflate the self-important. Such a singer is always likely to overstate his case. This is exactly what Lawino does in her abuse of Ocol in this poem.

Through this kind of overstatement, Okot took African poetry from defence to attack. Colonialists have been attacked for their oppressive policies in innumerable novels and poems. Certain glaring failings of Western culture were exposed by some works. But much of the writing before Song of Lawino was primarily defensive in its cultural comparisons. Many writers were involved mainly in telling the white man ‘we too have a culture.’ The first necessary exercise was to defend African culture from the abuses heaped on it by the colonialists.

This kind of writing has produced some excellent work, but it can have limitations. Many of you will have read Camara Laye's The African Child. This book has its good points, but its picture of African life is incomplete. For example, the writer plays down throughout the book the fact that his father was polygamous. He didn't want to spoil the favourable impression of African ways he was trying to give to French readers by references to something that might offend them. There is no such equivocation in Song of Lawino. Acoli ways are presented without apology, systematically compared to European ways and consistently found to be better. Lawino is proud, not only of her beauty, but of every aspect of her way of life. From this position of pride she attacks.

We can see this very well if we consider Lawino's attitude to sexual morality. The ‘dirty gossip’ of the colonialists condemned African dances because of the immorality of nakedness. Lawino doesn't waste her time on a reasoned and balanced defence of dancing naked. She presents the openness, liveliness and healthiness of the Acoli dance positively, without apology:

When the drums are throbbing
And the black youths
Have raised much dust
You dance with vigour and health
You dance naughtily with pride
You dance with spirit,
You compete, you insult, you provoke
You challenge all!

(p. 42)

Then she goes to the attack:

Each man has a woman
Although she is not his wife,
They dance inside a house
And there is no light.
Shamelessly, they hold each other
Tightly, tightly,
They cannot breathe.

(p. 44)

Western dances are immoral because people embrace in public and dance with anyone, even close relatives.

The same question of sexual morality is involved in her later comments on Catholic priests and nuns. The tradition of priestly celibacy has a long history in Europe. There is also a long tradition of priestly hypocrisy, and of literary mockery of this hypocrisy. But still the idea of celibacy has a serious basis in many people's minds and has been and still is, to a lesser extent, a familiar and influential idea in European culture. To Lawino the whole idea is completely incomprehensible. As Okot pointed out in African Religions in Western Scholarship:¹⁶

… the African viewpoint … takes sex as a good thing.

So when the Padre and the Nun shout at her, it must be their sexual frustration expressing itself:

They are angry with me
As if it was I
Who prevented them marrying …

(p. 85)

Again no priest can possibly discipline his sexual desires. The teacher from the Evening Speaker's Class follows her to the dance. (p. 81). And every teacher must be like this:

And all the teachers
Are alike
They have sharp eyes
For girls' full breasts …

Lawino turns on her attackers and exposes their own immorality and hypocrisy.

These attacks on western ways are another reason for the popular success of the poem. They make the poem lively and readable and give the shock effect of a first reading. The ridicule is firmly based on African ways of looking at things; many students will have heard this kind of thing in their village. The shock comes from seeing it on the printed page. Many students will be more familiar with condemnation of nakedness in dances than with mockery of Westernised dances.

Okot is making a number of very serious points through Lawino's mockery of Westernised ways. At its mildest he is saying that the idea of ‘progress’ cannot be applied to culture. Ocol thinks that Acoli ways of dress, dance and religion are ‘primitive’ and must be superseded. But Lawino shows ways in which western things can be dirty, stupid or hypocritical. At the same time she shows how traditional ways of life allow her to express herself fully and freely as a woman. Both ways of life are open to criticism, both ways of life are valid. If Lawino has learnt one way of life, why should she change? Why should the Masai wear trousers? The words like ‘witch’, ‘Kaffirs’ and ‘scorcerers’ that Ocol throws at her don't answer that question.

But Lawino doesn't believe that the two ways of life are equally valid for Africans, and neither does Okot. She thinks the customs of white people probably suit white people. She doesn't mind them following their own ways.

I do not understand
The ways of foreigners
But I do not despise their customs.

(p. 41)

She doesn't expect them to want to imitate her:

… no white woman
Wishes to do her hair
Like mine,
Because she is proud
Of the hair with which she was born …

(p. 56)

But those Africans who insist on following the ways of white people are foolish, because they misunderstand their own ways and do not know themselves. If they try to destroy African traditions, they will fail:

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.

(p. 41)

In the later chapters of Song of Lawino and in Song of Ocol, Okot shows us clearly what he thinks happens to those people who try to destroy their own roots. We can understand his points best if we look at the character of Ocol.

THE CHARACTER OF OCOL

If we read Song of Lawino carefully a clear picture of the character of Ocol emerges. In Song of Ocol, Ocol, out of his own mouth, confirms Lawino's view of him. In many places throughout Song of Lawino Lawino asserts that Ocol is rude and abusive both to her and to other people:

My husband abuses me together with my parents
He says terrible things about my mother …

(p. 35)

In Song of Ocol, Ocol confirms this impression. Rather than reasoning with Lawino he just shouts insults and throws her out of his house:

Song of the woman
Is sour sweet
It is pork gone rancid,
It is the honeyed
Bloodied sour milk
In the stinking
Maasai gourd.

(p. 124)

In Chapter 7, when a beggar predicts violent revolution, Ocol, the politician, makes no attempt to reason with him, but simply insults the man:

Out of my way
You cowardly fool
Creep back and hide
In your mother's womb …

(p. 145)

Ocol is ‘arrogant’ (p. 35).

But Ocol's arrogance and self-importance do not give him dignity. He is always in a hurry. He is ruled by time. Everything he does must take place at a fixed time:

… my husband insists
What exact time
He should have morning tea
When exactly to have coffee …

(p. 64)

Lawino doesn't understand the need for these set times. She does things when she wants to. Children are fed or washed when it is necessary (p. 69), and:

When sleep comes
Into their heads
They sleep …

(p. 69)

Why make your life harder by fixing times for everything? It just confuses her.

For the Acoli times is not a commodity that can be consumed until it is finished:

In the wisdom of the Acoli
Time is not stupidly split up
Into seconds and minutes
It does not flow
Like beer in a pot
That is sucked
Until it is finished.

(p. 69)

If visitors come when you are doing something you stop and enjoy their visit. But Ocol has no time to enjoy anything:

He never jokes
With anybody
He says
He has no time
To sit around the evening fire.

(p. 67)

All his life is haunted by his fear of wasting time. For Ocol, time is a commodity which can be bought and sold. It must not be wasted because:

Time is money.

(p. 67)

When visitors appear at his door Ocol tries to get rid of them quickly with the question:

What can I do for you?

(p. 68)

and even the crying of children makes him wild with rage because it interrupts his work (p. 67). Despite his high opinion of himself he is no more than a servant of time:

Time has become
My husband's master …

(p. 68)

and no one is likely to respect him because he:

… runs from place to place
Like a small boy.

(p. 68)

Other people don't share Ocol's views of his own importance.

Time is not Ocol's only master. He is a politician, and before the leaders of his party he behaves like:

… a newly-eloped girl …

(p. 108)

Ocol says in his speeches that he is fighting for national unity:

He says
They want to unite the Acoli and Lang'o
And the Madi and the Lugbara
Should live together in peace!

(p. 103)

But his political energies don't really seem to be geared towards bringing about unity, national or local. Most of his time as a politician is taken up with condemning other people. Ocol says that the Congress Party is against all Catholics, and that they will steal all their property, if elected:

(They) … will take people's wives
And goats and chickens and bicycles,
All will become the property
Of the Congress people.

(pp. 105-6)

And it is not only the other party that he condemns. When he talks to the party leaders, he:

… accuses other party leaders
Everybody else is useless,
He alone
Is the most hard working …

(p. 108)

The most destructive result of his political activity is its effect on his own family. Ocol's brother is in the Congress party. Because of this their former closeness is replaced by enmity. Ocol thinks his brother wants to murder him (p. 105). He forbids Lawino to talk to the man who may one day become her husband (p. 105). Politics has destroyed the unity of home and brought misery to every member of it:

The women there
Wear mourning clothes
The homestead is surely dead …

(p. 111)

Ocol's political activity has only created new conflicts without settling the old ones.

And the material benefits that might partially compensate for these new conflicts are only enjoyed by the few, only by the strong:

… if your chest
Is small, bony and weak
They push you off …

(p. 107)

This is the most important division brought by the political activities which followed Uhuru, the division between the rich, who have the politicians' favour, and the poor, who have nothing:

And those who have
Fallen into things
Throw themselves into soft beds,
But the hip bones of the voters
Grow painful
Sleeping on the same earth
They slept
Before Uhuru.

(p. 110)

The politicians, Okot says, are doing nothing about this division. They are too busy fighting one another.

Certainly Ocol sees no reason to do anything. In Chapter 6 of Song of Ocol he asks the voters to agree that because he has worked harder for Uhuru he deserves:

Some token reward.

(p. 139)

The reward he has taken for himself is a large house in the town and a big farm in the country (p. 139 and 141). He is not responsible for the sufferings of the voters:

Is it my fault
That you sleep
In a hut
With a leaking thatch?

(p. 139)

Why should Uhuru bring them wealth? They are just expecting too much. There must be powerful people and weak people and they can't be expected to mix:

Have lions
Begun to eat grass
To lie down with lambs
And to play games with antelopes?

(p. 142)

To Ocol these new divisions in African societies seem natural.

In Chapter 10 we are given further examples of Ocol's intolerance. Ocol will let neither Lawino's relatives, nor his own relatives into his house because they might make it dirty (p. 91) or give diseases to his children (p. 91). He condemns all traditional medicines. If they are occasionally effective it must be:

… by accident …

(p. 93)

Again, he condemns all traditional religious beliefs, because he is an educated man and a Christian. In the years since independence there has been a great deal of reassessment of the missionaries' views of African traditional beliefs by African Christians. Many Christians now see much that is of value in these beliefs.¹⁷ Ocol's attitudes have not changed at all. For him traditional beliefs are no more than ‘foolish superstitions’ (p. 92).

Ocol not only rejects these ‘superstitions’ himself; he wants to wipe them out. He prevents Lawino from visiting the diviner priest or making sacrifices when she is in trouble (p. 93). When his father was alive, he:

Once smashed up the rattle gourd
Cut open the drum
And chased away the diviner priest
From his late father's homestead.

(p. 95)

He later tried to destroy the tree on his father's shrine (p. 95). Yet Ocol is a religious man. Lawino must not wear charms, yet he wears a crucifix (p. 93). Prayer can be effective:

It is stupid superstition
To pray to our ancestors
To avert the smallpox
But we should pray
To the messengers of the Hunchback
To intercede for us.

(p. 93)

Ocol sees no similarity between the two sorts of charms or the two sorts of prayer.

In Chapter 9 we see another aspect of Ocol's arrogance. Lawino here asks questions in a genuine mood of enquiry. And she does not ask ‘silly questions’ (p. 87). The problem of who created the Creator and the mystery of the virgin birth are problems which better educated people have found to be barriers to Christian belief. An educated Christian like Ocol ought to have considered them. His casual refusal to discuss them because Lawino is not educated is a lame excuse. If he were really interested in knowledge he would be willing to discuss these things. But Lawino doesn't think he is really interested in knowledge. She wishes she had someone else to ask:

Someone who has genuinely
Read deeply and widely
And not someone like my husband
Whose preoccupation
Is to boast in the market place …

(p. 90)

What has this man gained from his education?

Lawino really makes us wonder whether this ‘progressive and civilised man’ (p. 36) deserves any respect. With all his status he surely ought to have a little more diginity. He surely ought to be more patient and tolerant. Above all he ought to treat his wife, his parents and his home community with a little more respect. In Chapters 8 and 12 we have Lawino's explanation of what has gone wrong. Ocol's teachers were like Lawino's teacher in the Evening Speaker's Class. If Ocol had run from them to the dance as Lawino did he would have learnt things that meant something to him:

We joined the line of friends
And danced among our age-mates
And sang songs we understood,
Relevant and meaningful songs,
Songs about ourselves …

(p. 79)

Instead he went to school, where pupils shout:

Meaninglessly in the evenings
Like parrots …

(p. 75)

They do not understand what they shout and the teacher controls them only by his anger. It seems as if Ocol is still like a parrot, boasting in the market place and condemning everything that the white priests told him to condemn, instead of picking out the good from both African and European ways.

Song of Ocol again confirms Lawino's opinions. In Chapter 2 Ocol trots out for us the attitudes to Africa that he has swallowed whole from the missionaries:

What is Africa
To me?
Blackness,
Deep, deep fathomless
Darkness …

(p. 125)

He goes on to tell us that Africans are ignorant, but stupidly content with their ignorant state. They are ruled by their fear of spirits and they have no technology. They are like children:

Unweaned,
Clinging to mother's milkless breasts …

(p. 126)

In Chapter 3, Ocol condemns all efforts to find reasons for pride in Africa's past. He would prefer to forget his past:

Smash all these mirrors
That I may not see
The blackness of the past
From which I came
Reflected in them.

(p. 129)

In other words, Ocol wants to deny his Africanness. These feelings wring from him the cry of anguish which ends Chapter 2:

Mother, mother
Why
Why was I born
Black?

(p. 126)

Ocol's white teachers have made him think of his continent, his community, his family and himself as essentially evil. They have robbed him of all his self-respect. He is even ashamed of his own body. His bombastic arrogance and nervous violence of language are attempts to hide this shame. These are ‘the winds’ with which he has tried to ‘blow away’ the ways of his ancestors. He has failed to destroy their customs. But he has succeeded in breaking up his homestead, so that his wife mocks him publicly in song. He and his friends have succeeded in dividing his nation into bickering factions struggling for power while a discontented majority are permanently excluded from it. The beggar in Chapter 7 of Song of Ocol predicts revolution as a consequence of these divisions:

A hunter
Sat in the shadow
Of a rock
Rubbed two sticks
A flash
Flame
Purified the land!

(p. 145)

In the face of Lawino's mockery, Ocol blusters with rage. In the face of the beggar's threats, he is flippant and smug.

In Chapter 12, Lawino summarises what has happened to Ocol. Ocol has read many books ‘… among white men.’ (p. 113). But the books have not helped him. Instead he has:

… lost his head
In the forest of books.

(p. 113)

And in the end the books have destroyed him:

… the reading
Has killed my man,
in the ways of his people
He has become
A stump.

(p. 113)

Ocol still has the roles of husband and head of a household, but he is no longer able to perform them. Instead he has become:

A dog of the white man!

(p. 115)

The white man is his ultimate master, acting on him through his continuing cultural and economic influences. Ocol obeys his master's call and is pleased only by those things that belong to his master.

Ocol no longer owns anything. Everything he uses belong to his master:

Aaa! A certain man
Has no millet field
He lives on borrowed foods
He borrows the clothes he wears
And the ideas in his head
And his actions and behaviour
Are to please somebody else
Like a woman trying to please her husband!
My husband has become a woman!

(p. 116)

And many young men are the same. Lawino calls on her clansmen to weep for them because:

Their manhood was finished
In the classrooms
Their testicles
Were smashed
With large books!

(p. 117)

Here Lawino is mocking all those Ocols who are carrying the habit of slavish imitation of white men they learnt in the Mission School into every sphere of their lives in the new nations of Africa.

But this is not Lawino's final word. She thinks there is still hope for Ocol. Ocol only needs treatment to rid him of his disease. First Lawino recommends physical remedies (p. 117). Ocol's throat is blocked by the shame that has been choking him for so long:

The shyness you ate in the church …

(p. 118)

It must be cleaned out by traditional foods and herbs. His ears are blocked by the things he has heard from priests and teachers. They must be cleaned. His eyes, behind his dark glasses, are blind to the things of his people. They must be opened. His tongue is dirty with the continuous flow of insults he has been pouring on his people. It must be cleaned.

When the physical remedies have been completed, Ocol will be ready for the real cure. He will be ready to regain his roots among his own people. Lawino explains how he nearly lost those roots:

When you took the axe
And threatened to cut the Okango
That grows on the ancestral shrine
You were threatening
To cut yourself loose,
To be tossed by the winds
This way and that way …

(pp. 119-20)

For this real cure, Ocol must beg forgiveness of all those he insulted. But he must also seek the blessing of the elders and beg forgiveness from the ancestors, because:

… when you insulted me
Saying
I was a mere village girl
You were insulting your grandfathers
And grandmothers …

(p. 119)

If he does all these things he will become a man again, the ancestors will help him recover:

Ask for a spear that you will trust
One that does not bend easily
Like the earth-worm
Ask them to restore your manhood!

(p. 119)

Lawino's final appeal concerns her domestic situation. She wants things to be normal in the household again. She wants Ocol to behave like her husband. And when he is recovered, if he only gives her:

… one chance …

(p. 120)

she is sure things will become normal. When his ears are unblocked he will hear the beauty of her singing. When his blindness is cured, he will see and appreciate her dancing:

Let me dance before you
My love,
Let me show you
The wealth in your house …

(p. 120)

When he is a man again, he will want her.

OCOL AS SPOKESMAN

If Song of Ocol is a reply to Song of Lawino then it is a bad one. Okot raises controversial issues in his poems, but he only puts one point of view in the controversy. I have already illustrated how many parts of Song of Ocol underline the points made in Song of Lawino. These two poems are not the thesis and antithesis of the argument, from which the reader can deduce a synthesis. Unlike some other African writers,¹⁸ Okot doesn't consider a cultural synthesis to be the solution to Africa's problems. He wishes to borrow technology from Europe, but not culture. Okot has very little sympathy with Ocol, so he makes Ocol reply in a clumsy way. Song of Ocol does not fairly represent an alternative to Lawino's point of view.

This is why, if we think of these poems as separate works, Song of Ocol is much weaker than Song of Lawino. Another weakness is the lack of a clear situation in most of the poem. In Song of Lawino, Okot exploits the dramatic impact of the domestic conflict to express his more serious points about the future of Africa. Ocol is only concerned with his domestic situation for one chapter. At the end of the first chapter he sends Lawino away, and, except for one reference, in Chapter 8 forgets her. In Chapters 2 to 5 it is not clear who is being addressed. In Chapters 6 and 7, he is talking to his constituents, and in Chapter 9, he throws out a challenge to everybody in his nation with any position of importance.

This lack of a clear dramatic situation has reduced the popular impact of Song of Ocol. For a reader who has not read Song of Lawino, the widely differing issues raised in Song of Ocol are confusing. With the knowledge we bring to the poem from Song of Lawino the unity behind Ocol's differing concerns in the poem is clear. Song of Lawino considered alone is a coherent unit. The two poems considered together make a coherent unit. Song of Ocol considered alone is disjointed. It contains many excellent pieces of poetry expressing important ideas, but they pull in different directions.

Though Ocol does not effectively reply to most of the points Lawino raises, he does reply to some. In some places in the poem Ocol is the writer's spokesman. Okot's sympathies are mainly, but not entirely, with Lawino. Okot drinks beer and whisky as well as kwete and waragi. He usually wears trousers, though not a blanket suit. When he is ill he is prepared to use the white man's medicine to help him recover. He is anxious that Africa should have the benefits of technology. Through Lawino, he couldn't say these things. Through Ocol, he can and does.

In Chapter 3, Ocol briefly, but effectively, comments on traditional medicine. However foolish he might be in condemning all traditional remedies it is difficult not to share some of his horror at the scene he describes:

That child lying
On the earth
Numb
Bombs exploding in his head
Blood boiling
Heavy with malarial parasites
Raging through his veins.
The mad woman
Spits on the palms
Of his hands
And on his feet
Squirts beer
On his face
Spills chicken blood
To cool him
On his chest
A gift of Death …

(p. 127)

Traditional remedies should have some place in Africa, but they cannot solve all her medical problems.

In Chapter 4 Ocol considers the position of women in traditional societies. It is interesting to compare his description of the walk from the well (p. 130) with Lawino's description of the walk to the well (p. 53). Lawino is happy with her traditional role, but she does have to work rather hard:

Woman of Africa
Sweeper
Smearing floors and walls
With cow dung and black soil
Cook, ayah, the baby tied on your back,
Vomiting,
Washer of dishes,
Planting, weeding, harvesting,
Store-keeper, builder,
Runner of errands,
Cart, lorry
Donkey …

(p. 133)

And in some ways here status is rather low:

In Buganda
They buy you
With two pots
Of beer,
The Luo trade you
For seven cows …

(p. 134)

If a little technology could reduce her work load, it would enable her to keep her beauty longer and she would have more time to dance before her husband.

In Chapter 5 Ocol makes fun of traditional concepts of manly behaviour. Ocol chooses a number of formerly powerful warrior communities of East Africa and challenges them to tell him what they have now gained from centuries of successful fighting:

Survey your booty
Study your empire
Your gains …

(p. 136)

These nomadic groups are the ones who have suffered most through recent developments in East Africa. They are now trapped in areas of poor pasture with depleted stocks of cattle. Worst of all they suffer the humiliation of being objects of the curiosity of prying white people:

Students of primitive man
Big game hunters
And tourists flocked in
From all corners of the world,
White women came to discover,
To see with their naked eyes
What manhood could be!

(p. 136)

Ocol asks his questions in an unnecessarily offensive way, but he is throwing out to these people a challenge which they must in some way accept.

The core of Ocol's speech in Chapter 9 is his expression of faith in the urban future of Africa, and in the foundations of that future laid by Europeans. Naively and improbably he promises to:

… erect monuments
To the founders
Of modern Africa:
Leopold II of Belgium,
Bismarck …

(p. 151)

But most of the speech is in the form of challenges to various people in positions of influence in Africa to explain the ‘African foundation’ (p. 150) of their activities. Here again Ocol is unwittingly speaking for Okot. Okot is mocking the borrowed plumes of all these dignitaries and challenging them to justify their borrowings.

Why should lawyers and bishops wear long robes as the English do? Why should the African legal system be based on English ‘Law Reports’? Why should all the officials in local government take their names from English equivalents (‘Mayors’, ‘Aldermen’, ‘Councillors’, ‘Town Clerks’). Okot's most serious challenge is to the ‘scholar’:

Can you explain
The African philosophy
On which we are reconstructing
Our new societies …

(p. 150)

Okot has made ‘the foundation’ on which he wishes to build African nations abundantly clear throughout this book. In these last pages he is challenging all concerned with nation building to reassess their own activities in the light of his ideas. If they don't accept the challenge, then, like Shaka, (p. 151), those like Nyerere and Senghor who are looking for an African mould for nation-building will be ‘utterly defeated’ by the continuing cultural influence of Europe on Africa.

Notes

1. For example: Dennis Osadebay, Thank You Sons and Daughters of Britannia; Thomas Mofolo, The Traveller of the East (London, 1934) and Chaka: An Historical Romance (London, 1931 and London, HEB [Heinemann Educational Books], AWS 229, 1981).

2. The best known of these poets are Leopold Senghor and Aime Cesaire but other poets from French speaking Africa associated themselves with this school of writing.

3. See Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London, HEB, AWS 1, 1962) and Arrow of God (London, HEB, AWS 16, 1965).

4. This story is retold by Taban lo Liyong in Eating Chiefs (London, HEB, AWS 74, 1970), p. 3.

5. Okot p'Bitek, African Religions in Western Scholarship (Nairobi, East African Literature Bureau, 1971; Towota, N.J., Rowman and Littlefield, 1972).

6. Ibid., Chapter 1, especially pp. 5 and 6.

7. Wer pa Lawino (Nairobi, East African Publishing House, 1969), p. 31. A fairly literal translation would read:

   It happens in everything that they behave in the white people's way, for white people don't feel shame. They embrace other people's wives, like white people, they hold their chests close, like white people. You smoke cigarettes like white people, both men and women like white people. You kiss each other's lips like white people, you suck each other's mouths like white people, you lick up the spit of each other's mouths like white people, so that the mouths of the men are covered with the red paint of white people.

8. Ibid., p. 26.

9. From Okot p'Bitek's The Horn of My Love (London, HEB, AWS 147, 1974).

10. Taban lo Liyong, The Last Word (Nairobi, EAPH [East African Publishing House], 1969), ‘Lawino is Unedu’, p. 141.

11. Ibid., p. 140.

12. Wer pa Lawino, op. cit., p. 38.

13. In the Kyambogo T. T. College magazine Nanga, Vol. 2, No. 3, May 1970.

14. lo Liyong, op. cit., p. 141.

15. p'Bitek, African Religions in Western Scholarship, op. cit., p. 22.

16. Ibid., p. 117.

17. See John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (London, HEB, 1969), p. 10:

    African religions and philosophy have been subjected to a great deal of misinterpretation, misrepresentation and misunderstanding. They have been despised, mocked and dismissed as primitive and underdeveloped … In missionary circles they have been condemned as superstition, satanic, devilish and hellish. In spite of all these attacks, traditional religions have survived, they dominate the background of African peoples, and must be reckoned with even in the middle of modern changes.

18. lo Liyong, op. cit., p. 206:

    African culture is to be a synthesis and a metamorphosis—the order of things to come. It assimilates and it disseminates. It picks, it grabs, it carries on … A racially and culturally mixed person is the universal man; all is in him; he identifies with all; he is kith and kin to all other Homo Sapiens.