62 pages • 2-hour read
Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol
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Symbols & Motifs
Pumpkins
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of racism and emotional abuse.
Pumpkins are an essential symbol utilized in Song of Lawino’s core refrain, “The pumpkin in the old homestead / Must not be uprooted” (41). In Uganda, pumpkins are a valuable cash crop that is native to the region and therefore well suited to cultivation. Traditionally, all parts of the pumpkin have culinary use; the flesh can be cooked in a number of ways (including being dried into flour), the leaves can be used as greens, and the seeds can be roasted. As Heron explains in his introduction:
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 (71).
This meaning will not be obvious to non-Acholi readers but would be immediately recognizable to Acholi ones, especially those reading the text in its original language; this commitment to using Acholi cultural signifiers is part of the text’s implicit resistance to colonialism.
Moreover, like many of the typically Acholi images used throughout the text, the pumpkin is a part of the Ugandan landscape, and the idea of uprooting it speaks to the destruction of the land itself (both literally and metaphorically since the roots of the pumpkin are embedded in the earth). Later, when Ocol vows to destroy the East African landscape in violent fashion, he associates this destruction with a metaphorical pumpkin rotting:
I see a large Pumpkin
Rotting
A thousand beetles
In it;
We will plough up
All the valley,
Make compost of the Pumpkins
And the other native vegetables (124).
Ocol thus reimagines uprooting the pumpkin as a necessity rather than a blatant act of waste, its decaying flesh turned into compost to support the growth of a new order. Within the broader context of the poem, however, this reimagining is a misunderstanding of the meaning of the proverb; he is treating the pumpkin as a metaphor for the traditional way of life as a whole rather than as a reminder to recognize the things about that way of life that are worthwhile.
Dogs
At various points, Lawino and Ocol both compare each other to dogs. These comparisons are insults launched at one another across poems with parallel meanings. The first such insult occurs in Chapter 1 of Song of Lawino, when Lawino reports that Ocol “compare[s] [her] with a little dog, / A puppy” (34). Though not as racially malicious as some of Ocol’s other descriptions of Lawino, this insult is nevertheless belittling and dehumanizing.
However, Lawino then uses Ocol’s own insult against him, saying in Chapter 12, “[Y]ou behave like / A dog of the white man! / A good dog pleases its master” (115). Unlike other, more culturally specific figurative language used throughout both poems, this imagery draws on a metaphor commonly used throughout the English-speaking world. P’Bitek therefore makes his commentary on colonialism and its racial politics accessible to foreign readers, spelling out his criticisms as clearly as possible through Lawino’s voice. By calling Ocol a dog and white men his masters, Lawino asserts that he has not achieved true liberation or autonomy from the colonial systems that oppress him, even though he is convinced that he has. P’Bitek therefore uses the dog as a symbol of cultural servitude, highlighting his conviction that the cultural autonomy of indigenous Africans is just as important as their political autonomy in the postcolonial world.
Dancing
Dancing scenes are a motif that appears in both Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, and the narrators’ opposing attitudes toward dance are emblematic of the broader poem’s central cultural conflict, developing themes of both National Conflict on a Domestic Scale and Patriotism in Tribalist and Nationalist Contexts. Lawino discusses dance most extensively in the third chapter of her song, “I Do Not Know the Dances of White People.” Here, she expresses pride and irrepressible fondness for traditional Acholi dances, describing one as follows:
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! (42).
The use of anaphora in this stanza evokes the rhythmic nature of the dance itself, as each “you” punctuates the flow of words like a drumbeat. Readers thus get a visceral sense of Lawino’s immersion in the experience of dance and her broader embrace of Acholi tradition. For Lawino, dance is an essential function of society, allowing people to secure their social status as well as court one another.
By contrast, Ocol has embraced the Western dances that Lawino sees as indecent and treats traditional African dance forms as tokens of everything he thinks is wrong with the continent, distancing himself from them and the cultures they emerge from. For instance, he takes aim at the famous Adumu jumping dance of the Maasai, describing them as “Drunk with the illusion / Of real power” while “Firmly holding to the spear, / The symbol of [their] backwardness” (136). For Ocol, African dances are a frivolous distraction from more important realities, like politics on a national scale; moreover, they reinforce ways of life he views as antithetical to the country’s progress.
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