Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol

Song of Ocol is a significantly briefer and more narrowly focused poem than Song of Lawino. Still, shared themes and ideas unite the two poems even as their speakers engage in verbal combat. Ocol shares many concerns with Lawino, most notably those of patriotism and gender. Though his views on these subjects are often diametrically opposed to Lawino’s, the similarities between the issues that they are preoccupied with tie both poems into one cohesive work that conveys p’Bitek’s overarching social critique.

Like Lawino, Ocol has a strong sense of patriotism, but his patriotism is centered on the future and predicated on the destruction of the past. He announces:

What is Africa

To me?

Blackness,

Deep, deep fathomless

Darkness;

Africa,

Idle giant

Basking in the sun,

Sleeping, snoring,

Twitching in dreams;

Diseased with a chronic illness,

Choking with black ignorance,

Chained to the rock

Of poverty (125).

This highly pessimistic vision of his own place of birth, riddled with racist language, indicates that Ocol feels a sense of loyalty to an Africa he has imagined could exist rather than the one that currently exists (which he views with disdain and prejudice). Another way of saying this is that Ocol is loyal to the idea of a Ugandan state rather than to his Acholi heritage, developing the theme of Patriotism in Tribalist and Nationalist Contexts. The future he envisions, however, does not seem much more utopian than the present he decries. He threatens those who remain loyal to traditional lifestyles with a metaphor that builds on the common association of light with knowledge, announcing that his goal is not “merely / To bring light / Into the hut?” but to “set it ablaze / Let fire consume it all / This liar of backwardness” (126). For Ocol, traditional African cultures (here represented by the hut in an instance of metonymy) are so defined by ignorance that they must be entirely eradicated rather than reformed. The integral role of violence in this vision of Africa indicates that p’Bitek does not intend for readers to agree with him; he is a fundamentally unreliable narrator.

Indeed, violence is one of the defining themes of Song of Ocol, and Ocol imagines it solving anything he deems a problem. This includes the issues of gender that concern him. He shares Lawino’s conviction that the men of Africa are too effeminate, but unlike Lawino, he believes that it is traditional culture that has caused them to be this way. He hurls mean-spirited accusations at the men of various tribes; apostrophizing a young Maasai man, for instance, he warns that the man’s brother is currently having sex with his wife and then questions why he would allow this “[y]et kill [a man] / For taking [his] shuka?” (138). These insults challenge the men to live up to a more European standard of masculinity, one that Ocol believes is more fitting of the modern era. If they do not live up to this challenge, he plans to use violence, threatening, “You will be disarmed, / If need be, by force” (137), and listing the various traditional weapons—“spears,” “colourful shields,” “bows,” and other symbols of African masculinity—that he intends to destroy.

Another point of commonality between Ocol and Lawino’s gender rhetoric is his concern about witches. In one episode, he describes a medicine woman failing to heal a sick child:

Mad creature,

Her hair

A burnt out forest,

Her eyes

A pair of rockets

Shooting out from the head,

Serpent tongue

Spitting poisons

Lashing crocodile tail (127).

His use of imagery here recalls Lawino’s description of ghosts in the “dark forest” of books. Later, while listing the types of people he plans to violently destroy, he includes arresting “all the witches, / Wizards, evil-eyes,/ Sellers of fetish bundles” (127-29). Like Lawino, he views witches as agents of cultural destruction, but unlike Lawino, he believes it is within his power to stop them. This difference speaks to the source of each character’s authority; Ocol wields significant power as a male politician, whereas Lawino relies on her status as chief of girls to grant her cultural credibility. Moreover, Ocol conflates witches with the traditional healers Lawino reveres, suggesting that the harm Ocol sees in them stems more from their supposed “backwardness” than from any magical power per se. Husband and wife’s divergent attitudes toward similar cultural elements elaborate on the theme of National Conflict on a Domestic Scale.

A further ironic parallel between the two poems is each speaker’s certainty that their side will prevail. Once again, however, the differences are instructive. Lawino recommends a course of action that she says will allow Ocol to reintegrate into traditional life and expresses great willingness to reconcile with Ocol if he does. By contrast, Ocol’s tone is characteristically violent, abusive, and lacking in affection: Lawino must adapt to modern ways—he does not promise he will return to her if she does—or die. Although both sides of the conflict emerge as intransigent, p’Bitek thus presents Ocol’s as leaving absolutely no space for dissent.