[In the following essay, Ofuani discusses the difficulties in translating p'Bitek's works, focusing particularly on White Teeth.]

White Teeth: A Novel is Okot p'Bitek's first—and last—published work. This apparent contradiction can be explained: it was his first published work because it appeared as Lak Tar Miyo Kinyero Wilobo (“White Teeth Make People to Laugh a Lot on Earth”), a story in the Acoli language published by the Eagle Press of the East African Literature Bureau in 1953, when Okot was 22 years old. As his last published work, it appeared posthumously in its English version in 1989. The problem of translating source text to target text that had been experienced in translating Song of Lawino from Wer pa Lawino surfaced once again. Could White Teeth then be old wine in new skins?

Okot p'Bitek's translation of Lak Tar was completed before his death in 1982. In an interview given in April 1979 in Ile-Ife, Okot had complained to his friend and Budo classmate David Rubadiri about the difficulties in translating it into English:

I have been trying to do it ever since, but it doesn't come through. … Well, I don't know the reason, but I put it into English and it becomes watery, you know? And you have to do a lot of explaining, because there are lots of local expressions, local scenes, and so forth, which are very much embedded in this short book. …

(19-20)

These doubts and anxieties about reproducing its exact ideational (experiential) content in the target English text resulted in three versions, as he later confessed to Lee Nichols:

I've tried three versions but I'm never happy with the translations at all because there's a lot of, you know, this thing called praise name? There's a lot of exchange of that. And those are just impossible to get across in English. And perhaps one day. …

(245)

Lubwa p'Chong also attests to Okot's difficulties in the task of rendering Lak Tar in English:

The translation of the novel from Acoli to English by the author later in the wake of the 1980s shortly before he died had not been an easy work and Okot p'Bitek grumbled assiduously as he laboured with the translation complaining that due to lack of suitable terms and vocabularies that befitted the colloquial Acoli terms, the English version was likely to lose a lot of meaning at the end.

(Foreword, White Teeth viii)

Okot p'Bitek's worries had thus been responsible for several divergences between two existing English versions, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, between the first full published version of White Teeth and its Acoli source text original, Lak Tar. The 1986 text “White Teeth Make People Laugh on Earth,” which appears in Artist, the Ruler: Essays on Art, Culture, and Values, begins with a Kiswahili proverb (and its English gloss) as an epigraph heralding the tragic content of the narrative:

Ninacheka na meno
Na roho yangu yanyesha
I laugh with my teeth
but my heart is bleeding

(115)

Not only is this epigraph dropped in 1989, but the first two sentences of the first chapter of the two texts are different:

                                                  1986
My name is Okeca Ladwong, but my
friends call me Atuk. Atuk is my
praise name: Atuk, Otuk ruk!

(“White Teeth” 115)

                                        1989
My name is Okeca Ladwong, but
friends calls me Atuk. Atuk is my
mwoc: Atuk, Otuk ruk!

(White Teeth 1)

The 1986 text is longer, and more explanatory; “praise name” is replaced with mwoc (glossed in a note) in 1989 and “my friends” has become “friends.” So p'Bitek's perpetual search for the ultimate text to convey his innermost feelings and message persists here as it had for Wer pa Lawino and Song of Lawino and the different versions of Song of Ocol and Song of Malaya. Because there was “no way to translate them economically,” p'Bitek retained a number of Acoli words that have not been translated, just as he did with the Lawino texts. This, as he told Bernth Lindfors, had been “deliberate”:

I was trying to punish all those lazy people who don't know my language. You may have noticed that I also deliberately kept the footnotes to a minimum. I believe literature is not something to know but something to feel. If you put in a lot of footnotes, people will begin to say, “Oh, I know, I know,” which is not my idea of literature at all. Literature should provoke tears of laughter, it should provoke anger, it should arouse something in you. This does not happen in dry tedious research.

(137)

Only four items out of a total of 102 Acoli words and expressions are thus glossed in White Teeth. Those Acoli words and expressions range from features of the physical environment of the region and its flora and fauna to cultural processes, including foods, drinks, weapons, trees, vegetation, birds, animals, fish, landmarks, rivers, rapids, seasons, and they are sufficiently cushioned with intratextual explanations for the facilitation of comprehension by non-Acoli readers. Thus the pull between linguistic exactness and the need to reach a wider English-language reading audience persists from the experience with Lawino. The 1989 text is thus shorter, more direct and condensed than the 1986 text:

(1) The man has to do the last fifteen miles on foot, as he stops and meditates in the shade of every tree along the way until he arrives at home that night. He dares not enter the house because his mother is expecting him to come home with money so he can marry a girl who can help her. So he stands behind the house, and the mother is talking inside. She had been beaten by someone during the day so she is crying and saying, “Wait until my son comes home!”

(Lindfors 140)

(2) And the most terrible scene is the last chapter when the young man goes home. Having arrived by bus he walks to his home about twenty miles or so and he cannot dare to go there by day because he's so ashamed. He knows what his mother is hoping for and so on. So he reaches there by night. And he gets to the back of the house and hears the mother crying. She'd been beaten by some other man and she's saying, “Wait until my son gets back and he'll get married.” And then some of the boys, having seen him, think he's come to steal a woman so they get hold of him and beat him up and then recognize him and the story ends there.

(Nichols 245)

Though the tragedy of Okeca Ladwong's lost property and misery is retained in White Teeth, it ends abruptly and in suspense, as he leaves Gulu for home:

I spent the night at Minakulu PWD work camp because it was already dark, and also because my knees were aching and very weak due to hunger. I must confess a wrong I did on the way: I stole some cassava tubers from someone's garden and ate them raw to gain some strength to walk the remaining distance. The following morning, I set off again and arrived in Gulu, the headquarters of the Acoli, before sunset. I had now only fifteen miles to do on foot to our village, under the Ladwong Hill, Ajulu. That distance was nothing. …

(106)

The narrative ellipsis at the end of the novel allows the reader to imagine the untold magnitude of Okeca's misfortune, having learned the expectations of his mother, his sister Acirokop, and his betrothed Cecilia Laliya. We are spared the details provided in p'Bitek's narratives in texts 1 and 2 above, but the end is no less tragic. Okeca Ladwong's fortitude in accepting that the fifteen-mile distance “was nothing” does not reduce the pathos.

The differences in the texts have been explained by p'Bitek's wife, Caroline Auma Okot p'Bitek:

It is my greatest pleasure to introduce the translated version of my late husband's novel, Lak Tar. The book was his first step in the long journey he travelled into the literary world. Okot worked on the translation of this book himself, early 1982, before he died and was pleased to have completed the translation, although he often complained the translation had lost the flavour the book had in Acoli. He then submitted two [really four!] chapters of his translation to be published in the Artist the Ruler (Heinemann, 1986) as he went on to polish the translation to his satisfaction. He died before he put the finishing touches on the White Teeth version. I am grateful to Lubwa p'Chong who helped with the last bit.

(White Teeth iv; emphasis added)

The divergences are, therefore, results of the “polishing” of the 1986 text.

White Teeth draws heavily from p'Bitek's background, tending towards the autobiographical, even if fictional. It is set in many parts of pre-Independence post-World War II Uganda and begins and ends in the traditional homelands of the Acoli. The Acoli live in the savannah grasslands of Northern Uganda, an area stretching northwards from the Murchison area of the Victoria Falls to the Sudanese border. Gulu, their main administrative town, features in White Teeth, as does Ajulu, the home village of Okeca Ladwong, at the foot of the Ladwong Hill. Okot p'Bitek's father, Opii Jebedyo, was from the Pa-Cua clan of the Patiko chiefdom, whose clan homeland is Ajulu. His mother, Lacwaa Cerina, also called Lawino, came from the Palaro chiefdom, whose homeland is north of Ajulu. The Acoli phrase “Lak Tar” was p'Bitek's father's mwoc (praise name), as he tells us in Horn of My Love (169). Could the story have been that of Okot's childhood friend Atuk (Horn of My Love 169) who is made to tell the story as affected persona Okeca Ladwong? Is it by chance that Okeca's father adopts Okot's father's mwoc? Another character, Ongiya, takes the name of still another of Okot's friends (Horn of My Love 169). Furthermore, the circumstances of Okot p'Bitek's birth are similar to Okeca Ladwong's in Chapter One. Okot p'Bitek delighted in explaining the circumstances of his birth. According to one version reported by p'Chong, he told his friends:

On the day I screamed out of my mother's womb, whether in protest, or excitement, or for whatever reason, it was in the house and hands of Miss Brown Cave, a famous White missionary in Gulu. When my mother was in labour pain, Miss Cave was sent to take her to Gulu Hospital. But they could not reach the hospital because I was too much in a hurry to come out. So Miss Cave drove to her house where I was born, she acting as the midwife.

(Artist the Ruler 1)

He had been named Okot, or “the rain” (Kot is rain). When he was born, “the afterbirth contained bubbles of water” because “that's a sign of rain” (Nichols 243). Could it be by chance then that Okeca is born in “a cave” and that it had “rained on and on like the quarrelling of women” (3)? The details may not tally, but these correspondences are unmistakable.

A novel in seven chapters of varying length, White Teeth chronicles different aspects of Okeca Ladwong's life: from birth, through childhood and adolescence, to maturity. It is the pathetic story of a fatherless young man whose mother is inherited by an insensitive uncle and who is left with an ugly sister as the only source of bride wealth. The novel is narrated predominantly in the first person; because of his limited perspective, Okeca produces witnesses to provide exposition and background linkages. For instance, in Chapter One he tells us about the circumstances of his birth in the cave during a heavy rainfall. He sounds omniscient, but he tells us that “[a]ll these were told me by my maternal grandfather, Sergeant Otto Bwangomoi, after I had grown up into a little boy” (4). Also, the murky circumstances of his father's death by poisoning are explained to him by his mother just before he leaves home for Kampala (33). During the quarrel at Corporal Okello's home in Kampala, a letter sent to Okello by Corporal Lacim had provided further revelations, and these are unexpectedly discovered by the illiterate Okeca:

We were not told what the letter was about. But I was lucky to learn what was in it. The letter had been thrown away and I found it when I was looking for some piece of paper for wrapping my abugwe tobacco. It was written in Swahili. So I took it to a boy in Nsambya Police Barracks to read and translate to me.

(154)

However, in the exhortative mwoc songs used in moments of distress, Okeca uses the second person to distance himself as narrator from himself as affected victim. There seems to be no escape from this, linguistically, as the mwoc has a fixed formula, specifically as exhibited in the scene before his arrest in Kampala:

Atuk, otuk ruk!
Upsetter of the cooking pot
Your eye-lids are heavy because
You wish to eat alone!
We are lions
We are a dish of okra
A little dish of okra
Finishes a big lump of kwon!

(59)

In these lines, the first-person plural refers to the community to which the narrator belongs, and so the values pronounced include those of the narrator.

The story is narrated by an older Okeca Ladwong who uses suspense to lead us on. He adopts a fairly chronological plot, after the introductory phase in Chapter One, as he takes us gradually from his birth through boyhood, adolescent days, maturity, and betrothal, to his departure for Kampala, his days in Kampala and Jinja, back to his tragic losses in Kampala on his way back home to Ajulu. But the narrator's age is revealed when, early in the narration, he says:

The suffering at the hands of father's brother because of the daughter of Gurucenycio Obiya Balmoi Cotta, and the suffering I went through in a distant land, should have blocked my throat completely and stopped me from laughing any more in this world.

(2)

Coming so early in the novel, this passage indicates what we should expect later, despite the attempt to begin with “One morning many years ago” (2) as he tries to tell about his birth and parentage.

The satiric scope of White Teeth is quite broad. In general terms, the novel is a commentary on the changes that were taking place in the 1950s with the custom of bridewealth in Acoliland upon the introduction of a monetary economy as parents began charging exorbitant prices for their marriageable daughters. White Teeth exposes the tragic consequences of the bridewealth system—also seen in “Return the Bridewealth” and even in Song of Lawino. Okeca Ladwong's story highlights its attendant misfortune for young couples in love, specifically for himself and Cecilia Laliya. This system is responsible for Onen's trepidation and misery at Jinja, as well as for the misfortune of all the young men and women who arrive in Kampala unprepared for the impersonality and insensitivity of its urban setting, a setting that is starkly different from the closeness and protective warmth of their village homes. The system turns them into petty thieves, pimps, prostitutes, and jailbirds, as Obina confesses to Okeca in jail in Kampala, leading to betrayals in Jinja. Okeca implies that the exorbitant prices are responsible for all the social misfortunes that befall the youths of his generation, married and single, tracing an analogy between the bridewealth system and a market, with women and men as the wares:

Everything was there. Not only foodstuffs: men who were long past their peak but still bachelors would find spinsters also past their prime; married women with withered love for their husbands could find men who loved their wives less … Young men who had lived away from home used the market day to expose themselves. Market day: Saturday! It was a hunting day and a day on which to be hunted.

(17)

Other problems associated with the bridewealth are exposed through dialogue (18-19). Bride prices are responsible for male disregard of women's social dignity; for wife-beating as men vent their frustrations on their women; for marital infidelity and conjugal unhappiness as wives go off with other men and men like Corporal Okello bring prostitutes to their matrimonial homes. It is a form of slavery:

We are mere property bought off the market stall. You know I insisted my parents should not demand too much money on me, but in vain. Acoli parents these days seem to value money more than their daughters.

(18)

The women may be at the immediate receiving end, but White Teeth portrays the Acoli society as the exploiter. Parents—male and female, representatives of the adult society—are responsible for the havoc.

Very early in White Teeth, Okeca's searchlight focuses on another bestial Acoli custom, portrayed through the eyes of a boy—that is, the processes of burial and mourning, as they affect women (11-12). He paints a degrading picture of his mother in mourning:

I took a peep inside: mother was wearing a dress I had never seen before and her head was tied with some red band—cola! Her eyes were red like embers in the cooking place, her hands were tied together with a rope for tethering the stubborn billy goat and two women on either side of her held her by the chest.

(11; emphasis added)

Okeca clearly disapproves of a mode of treatment suitable only for “stubborn billy goats.” His mother's heart-rending scream was “like a pig that had been stabbed at the death spot” (11). Animal imagery conveys the rural perspective of the untravelled Okeca. Like Lawino after him, Okeca uses subtle animal imagery to portray a negative picture of the Acoli way of life. For a child, his narration contains an unmistakable tone of bitterness, which extends to the description of his father's burial rites. He had been excited to return home to relieve his hunger, “the hunger herdsboys always went through,” only to discover his father's untimely death. But his pain is lost on others:

A big bull was slaughtered. Beer was as plenty as that made for marriage celebrations. Indeed the day was a mixture of pain and pleasure, sadness and happiness because some people enjoyed themselves thoroughly while others wept bitterly.

(12)

People danced. Again, the mature Okeca takes over the narration temporarily as his bitterness resurfaces: “Throughout the night, people drank, ate, sang, dance, and some even made love!” (12). His loathing and surprise could not be withheld. His father's property and even his wives are shared by clan elders, “as the custom required” and “in a way I did not follow,” among his father's brothers. Okeca got only four goats. And that was the end of his father: “dead, buried, eaten, drunk, [sung] and forgotten” (12). Hopeless, he depended on his physique as a “strong young boy” for sustenance. His neglect, therefore, is intricately linked to bridewealth, to societal greed. His relatives are portrayed as irresponsible. The materialistic and greedy Uganda society that relishes theft and covetousness is also lampooned (21-22). The song “I have no bridewealth” (21-22) reveals the Acoli society as one that revels in adultery, marital infidelity, abductions, and cattle raids. It is a society that is morally bankrupt.

The unsavory competition for women by men is criticized. Okeca Ladwong disapproves of the crude strategies for wooing women through insults and fights and depicts an almost lawless local society where the only deterrent is the threat of the “whiteman's laws” (24), thus providing one instance where he shows that a Western social institution is desirable. Internecine squabbles and conflict also come under his scrutiny. For instance, the Bangatira young men are uncivil and intolerant. They revere their sisters, yet want Tyenakaya girls from Alokolam (24). The betrayal of Okeca Ladwong, an Acoli, by Ogyang, a Langi, is a subtle commentary, as p'Chong shows, “on the age old conflict between the Acoli and the Langi tribes of Northern Uganda” (vii-viii).

Kampala is portrayed as a capital city festering with corruption among police and prison officials. Okeca provides narrative distance in describing how everyone feels about Kampala on the eve of his departure from home. It had been “the famous city, Kampala.” But Kampala is really a haven for thieves, pickpockets, pimps, prostitutes, corrupt officials, and so on. When Okeca is wrongly jailed, the event provides a unique opportunity for direct experience of the bribery and corruption among both the police and prison hierarchy. The judiciary holds the only hope of redemption and justice as he is freed by the magistrate (71).

The physical, material, and psychological exploitation of Africans by Asians is also exposed. Okeca becomes a “marauding thief” for accidentally knocking down an Indian in Kampala. Another Asian robs him of his money and dignity at Jinja; he had to run, a venture that opens the floodgate of subsequent losses and misfortunes. White Teeth also criticizes luroni, the conscript labor system introduced by the white man's government (30). Young men are conscripted to construct roads such as the Gulu-Pakwach and buildings in Gulu.

The portrayal of Otto, his maternal grandfather, affords Okeca an opportunity to take a swipe at the military. To him, they are killers, just as they are in the popular view: “If any of you wants to be a killer, let him go and join the army. That's where people are trained and paid to kill” (25). Okot p'Bitek's later works, such as Song of Prisoner, “Order of the Black Cross,” “Return the Bridewealth,” and “Song of Soldier” portray a similar disgust for soldiers, who are shown as wife-snatchers, warmongers, and yet themselves victims of society. Soldiers are also poorly paid despite the hazards and perceived glamour of their jobs. Sergeant Otto Bwangmoi, however, emerges as a benevolent storyteller and lover of children who is knowledgeable and worldly as well as widely travelled.

Thus, in many of its facets, White Teeth: A Novel could have set the tone for p'Bitek's later works, had it appeared before them. Appearing as Lak Tar, it had limited accessibility to readers (a factor which seemed to have prompted its translation) and it could not be linked immediately, chronologically, to the development of the dramatic monologue texts that followed Song of Lawino in p'Bitek's literary career. The reading public had to wait over thirty years for its publication. In being a translation of Lak Tar, White Teeth could be likened to old wine in new skins, the same old material appearing in another language. Though he did not write another novel, there are many correspondences between White Teeth and p'Bitek's adopted long dramatic monologue texts, which Ken Goodwin describes as “verse-novels” (159). These correspondences include its length. Song of Lawino is even more voluminous than White Teeth. Like them, it is a first-person narration in which the persona is not just a witness, but an active participant, actually the protagonist. The narration is consistently from the perspective of this persona. The works are all satiric, with the critical searchlight often training on several society shortcomings. They all use Acoli descriptive words and phrases as the persona searches for more linguistic aptness. And with the exception of “Order of the Black Cross,” they are all set in Uganda, though their ideational contents could have wider African applications.

Despite these correspondences, White Teeth emerges as a remarkably fresh English-language text, not just as a version of Lak Tar. It maintains an ideational content that is similar to its source text, but its distinctiveness appears in p'Bitek's bid in fashioning a fresh text. It also manifests a fresh attitude in its presentation of women in a positive manner, not as detestable objects of ridicule but as society's victims. Though many critics have chosen to misunderstand p'Bitek's presentation of Lawino and even Malaya as women, despite his explanation that Lawino (and this is also true of Malaya and others) is “not only an individual character, she is also a representative of the kind of oppressed, despised members of society … a village woman, examining society with the viewpoint of the village” (in Nichols 90), a fresh perspective emerges from his presentation of the women in White Teeth. His presentation is not sexist or chauvinist, but rather realistically womanist, sympathetic. Women are oppressed, exploited, demeaned. But they are resilient, reasonably independent, and confident. Okot p'Bitek, through Okeca Ladwong, seemed to have faith in their ability to survive, to take life head on, to persevere. While he presents the men as disappointing, as instruments of dangerous change, of tragedy, the women—his mother, his sister Acirokop, his loved one Cecilia Laliya at Ajulu—remain the ultimate custodians of hope, of continuity, to compensate for the men's irresponsible wreckage of society. They remain as custodians of culture, as society's props, stable, enduring. Okeca Ladwong returns home hopeful to meet these important women in his life. They remain his only symbols of optimism in a bleak male-dominated society. The women of the city, for all their perversion, also emerge as independent personalities—resourceful, enterprising, forward-looking, unresigned. They defiantly accept that if they cannot make their sun stand still, they will make it run. If they cannot alter their destiny, they can exploit it to advantage. This is fresh wine in new skins!

Works Cited

Goodwin, Ken. “Okot p'Bitek.” Understanding African Literature: A Study of Ten Poets. London: Heinemann, 1982. 154-72.

Lindfors, Bernth. Mazumgumzo: Interviews with East African Writers, Publishers, Editors and Scholars. Athens, OH: Ohio U Center for International Studies, African Program, 1980.

Nichols, Lee. “Okot p'Bitek (Interview).” Conversations with African Writers. Ed. Lee Nichols. Washington, DC: Three Continents, 1981. 242-52.

p'Bitek, Caroline Auma Okot. “Acknowledgements.” White Teeth: A Novel by Okot p'Bitek. iii-v.

Okot, p'Bitek. Lak Tar Miyo Kinyero Wilobo. (Acoli.) Nairobi: Eagle, 1953.

———. Song of Lawino: A Lament. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1966.

———. “Return the Bridewealth.” Transition 5.24 (1966): 52-53. Rpt. Poems from East Africa. Ed. David Cook and David Rudabiri. London: Heinemann, 1971. 124-29.

———. Wer pa Lawino. (Acoli.) Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969.

———. “Order of the Black Cross.” Journal of the New African Literature and the Arts 9/10 (1971): 73-74.

———. Two Songs: Song of Prisoner, Song of Malaya. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1971.

———. Horn of My Love. London: Heinemann, 1974.

———. White Teeth: A Novel. Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya, 1989.

———. “White Teeth Make People Laugh on Earth.” Artist, the Ruler: Essays on Art, Culture, and Values. Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya, 1986. 115-29.