Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol

Born in 1931 in the city of Gulu, Uganda, Okot p’Bitek was raised Protestant. After completing secondary school, he attended the Government Teacher Training College in Mbarara (now Kyambogo University), where he learned how to teach English and “religious knowledge” courses. While in these later stages of schooling, he wrote his first work, The Lost Spear, a retelling of a traditional Luo folktale, which he said was heavily influenced by The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The manuscript for this work was lost, but he published his first novel in Acholi, Lak Tar, shortly thereafter.

During this period, p’Bitek had hopes of pursuing a career in soccer and traveled around the north of the country for games, an experience that exposed him to the people and traditions of Acholiland. In 1958, he traveled with the Ugandan national team on a tour of Great Britain. Realizing that his dreams of becoming a professional athlete were unlikely to come true, he stayed in England and studied education at the University of Bristol before moving on to a law program at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Heron writes that p’Bitek lost his Christian faith during his time in Britain and that at the same time, he became increasingly interested in studying traditional Acholi culture. In 1962, after completing his law degree, p’Bitek transferred to Oxford University to study social anthropology. This course of study resulted in his thesis, Oral Literature and its Background among the Acoli and Lang’o.

After completing his thesis, p’Bitek returned to a newly independent Uganda. As a faculty member at Makerere College, he helped to found the Gulu City Festival, which he organized and performed in. Around this time, he wrote Song of Lawino in its original Acholi form. The political criticisms in the poem would lead to his eventual dismissal from his faculty position, and he left Uganda for over a decade to work at the University of Nairobi. In Kenya, he continued to write and publish essays, poetry, and short stories. He was finally invited back to Makerere College in the early 1980s, but his time there was cut short by an untimely death in 1982 at the age of 51.

Heron examines Song of Lawino’s relationship with traditional Acholi songs. The poem was composed with the help of p’Bitek’s many collaborators on the Gulu Festival project, who listened to and commented on each draft of the poem’s chapters. This collaborative method of writing, Heron says, mimics the songwriting process in Acholi tradition, which involves edits and adjustments even as the songs are being performed. Other elements that are taken from Acholi songs include Lawino’s use of direct address, repeated refrains (in the English translation, many refrain lines are cut to avoid exhausting readers), and Acholi imagery. For example, the poem’s core refrain, “The pumpkin in the old homestead / Must not be uprooted!” is an Acholi proverb that is completely removed from the universe of Western symbolism (6). Heron explains that the proverb is meant to warn Ocol against destroying things purely for destruction’s sake.

Heron goes on to explain that the English translation of Song of Lawino was an “afterthought” for p’Bitek. He first translated a brief excerpt to read it aloud at a writing conference in Nairobi, and the excitement of the audience persuaded him to translate the whole poem. He also realized at a later stage that Lawino’s perspective was not suitable for conveying all of his ideas about East Africa, so he wrote Song of Ocol in English to complement Song of Lawino. The English translation of Song of Lawino is highly literal, resulting in the loss of some of the work’s more figurative meanings since Acholi proverbs do not carry the same weight in another language. However, by choosing to make his translation literal, p’Bitek preserved the distinct, East African effect of his original poems and prevented the introduction of overly Western imagery and ideas into the poem. Sometimes, his literal translations convey Lawino’s confusion about Western culture, and sometimes, he leaves Acholi words untranslated to emphasize the Acholi-ness of the text for non-Acholi readers.

Whereas the original Acholi version has a regular meter and rhyme scheme, p’Bitek uses free verse in his English translation of Song of Lawino. Heron observes that he tends to arrange his words such that important meaning is backloaded at the end of each line. This choice conveys Lawino’s anger, as if she is punctuating each thought forcefully before moving on to the next. In Song of Ocol, however, p’Bitek is far more irregular in his construction of meter, resulting in a flowing effect that illustrates Ocol’s comfort with the English language. Because Ocol seeks to reject traditional Acholi life, he also rejects traditional Acholi imagery, allowing p’Bitek to “create his own imagery” for the poem (11).

Heron orients readers to an ongoing debate among literary scholars about whether or not Lawino is believable as a character. He says that the problems Lawino faces as a wife rejected by her husband following his acquisition of a European education occur frequently for African women, but that what needs to be considered is whether her responses to this problem are realistic or not. He expresses the personal opinion that Lawino is very believable for the first five chapters but that her credibility deteriorates a little bit when Clementine disappears from the text. This is an inflection point in the poem that has troubled many critics, some of whom have argued that without a romantic rival, Lawino’s complaints about Ocol make no sense. Heron partially disputes this argument, asserting that Lawino’s main conflict is not with Clementine but with Ocol and his rejection of Acholi culture; there is thus “no contradiction between Lawino as an offended first wife and Lawino as the defender of Acoli values” (13).

P’Bitek wrote Song of Lawino as an outlet for expressing his personal concerns about the state of East African society, and Lawino is the mouthpiece for many of these concerns. Academic critics of the text have expressed doubts that an uneducated woman could effectively voice p’Bitek’s social criticisms, but Heron contends that Lawino does just that: “Though she always uses simple language, as we shall see, she raises most of the issues about Westernisation that an intellectual might have raised” (14). Heron goes on to explain that p’Bitek was particularly concerned with Westerners’ use of malicious gossip when describing Africans to the outside world. Lawino’s colloquial mode of speaking effectively turns the tables, weaponizing gossip against the colonizers. Whether or not she is always fair to the Europeans she is critiquing or to Clementine, her attacks reveal her own cultural values. Ultimately, he argues that Lawino believes in the equal value of different cultures but that she also believes Europeans should stick to European cultures and Africans should stick to African cultures. Furthermore, she believes that any attempts to destroy indigenous African cultures by Eurocentric Africans like Ocol will inevitably fail.

Heron turns to examining how p’Bitek characterizes Ocol. He writes that Ocol’s words often confirm Lawino’s criticisms of him; he is verbally abusive, arrogant, and undignified. Furthermore, the political activities that have made him so self-important are ultimately unproductive, generating more conflict within his community than solutions to genuine problems. He seems very content with the socioeconomic divisions that divide the newly independent Uganda, even though he is in a position of power that might enable him to help struggling neighbors. All of these characteristics are meant to make readers question whether Ocol is as “progressive and civilised” as he claims to be (24). In truth, he appears to be ashamed of his race, displaying an internalized form of white supremacy that he learned from European teachers. In Lawino’s eyes, he is shamefully subservient to white men, a trait that undermines his masculinity in the traditional Acholi sense. She believes that if these character flaws are remedied, he will want her once more and their marriage will return to its proper state.

Overall, Heron thinks that Song of Ocol is a flimsy response to the criticisms leveled against Ocol in Song of Lawino, which he attributes to the fact that p’Bitek does not have nearly as much sympathy for Ocol as he does for Lawino. His writing of both characters is thus biased toward Lawino’s perspective. However, there are some areas in which p’Bitek agrees with Ocol, and these are ideas that were impossible to express through Lawino’s voice. For instance, p’Bitek believed that Africans should embrace technological and medical innovations from the West. He also firmly believed that the continent had an urban future (as Ocol does) but that African societies would face an ongoing challenge of unstoppable European influence. Ocol expresses a similar sentiment throughout his song, challenging his fellow Africans to identify the African foundations of their modern societies.