奥考特·庇代克

作品

• 1966拉维诺之歌

  先以阿乔利语写成、再由作者自己译成英文出版的长诗：拉维诺抱怨她在教会学校受过教育的丈夫奥克尔瞧不起她和她族人的生活方式；它成为东非文学的经典，其后有《奥克尔之歌》（1970年）。

• 1970西方学术中的非洲宗教

  对从传教士到普拉西德·唐普尔斯和约翰·姆比蒂的非洲宗教研究的论战：学者们把非洲诸神描述为全能、全知和永恒，从而使它们“希腊化”；必须以非洲宗教自己的概念来描述它们，并使其研究摆脱基督教护教学。

立场

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.

生平与背景

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.

其他主要作品

• Song of Lawino (1966; Acholi Wer pa Lawino)
• Song of Ocol (1970)
• African Religions in Western Scholarship (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)