Okot p’Bitek

Works

• 1966Song of Lawino

  Long poem written first in Acholi and published in the author’s own English version: Lawino complains that her husband Ocol, educated in mission schools, despises her and the ways of their people; it became a classic of East African literature and was followed by Song of Ocol (1970).

• 1970African Religions in Western Scholarship

  Polemic against the study of African religions from the missionaries to Placide Tempels and John Mbiti: by describing African gods as omnipotent, omniscient and eternal, scholars have “Hellenised” them; African religions must be described in their own concepts and their study freed from Christian apologetics.

Position

Okot p’Bitek is on the map as one of the sharpest critics of the way African thought was studied in the 1960s, and as a poet who turned that critique into literature. In African Religions in Western Scholarship (1970) he argued that the study of African religions had served others’ purposes: early anthropologists used it to show African primitiveness, missionaries to find “preparations” for the Gospel, and African nationalist scholars – he named John Mbiti, Bolaji Idowu and J. B. Danquah – to prove that Africans had always known the Christian God. By describing African deities as omnipotent, omniscient and eternal, they had dressed them in the clothes of Greek metaphysics; the jok of the Acholi, for example, were not beings of that kind. Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy belonged, in his view, to the same project of making Africa fit Christianity. African religions should instead be described in their own concepts and as part of a whole way of life, which he attempted in Religion of the Central Luo (1971). In Song of Lawino (1966) Lawino defends the dances, food, songs and medicine of her people against her husband Ocol, who has adopted the manners and the contempt of the colonial elite; the poem and its sequel Song of Ocol (1970) became a reference for debates on culture and modernity in East Africa. Dismas Masolo (1994) discusses him among the critics of ethnophilosophy, and Samuel Oluoch Imbo (2002) reads his work as a contribution to African philosophy through oral traditions.

Life & context

Okot p’Bitek was born in Gulu in northern Uganda on 7 June 1931, the son of a teacher and of a singer and composer, from whom he learned the oral poetry of the Acholi. He attended King’s College Budo and trained as a teacher; in 1956 he toured Britain with Uganda’s national football team and stayed to study education in Bristol, law in Aberystwyth and social anthropology at Oxford, where his thesis (1964) dealt with the oral literature of the Acholi and Lango. Back in Uganda he lectured at Makerere and in 1966 became director of the National Theatre and Cultural Centre in Kampala, from which he was dismissed in 1968 after criticising the government. He then taught at the University of Nairobi, founded the Kisumu Arts Festival and held posts in Iowa, Texas and at Ife in Nigeria; he returned to Makerere as professor of creative writing shortly before his death in Kampala on 20 July 1982.

Further main works

• Song of Ocol (1970)
• Religion of the Central Luo (1971)
• Two Songs: Song of Prisoner, Song of Malaya (1971)
• Africa’s Cultural Revolution (1973)
• Artist, the Ruler: Essays on Art, Culture and Values (1986)