Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of racism, emotional abuse, sexual harassment and violence, and graphic violence.

“African writers who choose to use English or French set themselves certain problems. They wish to express African ideas, but they have chosen a non-African tool to express them. There is a grave danger that with the tool of language they will borrow other foreign things.”

Heron puts forward language as one of the major challenges for Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol and for African literature as a whole. P’Bitek’s solution to this challenge was to write his poems in Acholi before translating them into English, thereby expressing his African ideas using an appropriately African tool. This shifts the problem of language onto the non-African world, as English-language readers are forced to work with an unavoidably imperfect translation; in this way, it reverses the linguistic dynamics of colonialism and constitutes a form of resistance.

“Lawino is free to turn the Western weapon of ‘dirty gossip’ back on its users. It is natural for her to express the prejudices of her people. And these prejudices are simply the negative expression of her positive beliefs. By using Lawino, Okot is able to present Acoli ideas without the awareness of the other side’s case which hampers some of the more intellectual approaches.”

Heron suggests that p’Bitek saw intellectualism as a barrier to conveying his intended message in Song of Lawino—an apprehension that may have derived from his personal experiences as a scholar of anthropology. In Song of Ocol, p’Bitek addresses Ugandan politicians’ vehement dislike of intellectuals (particularly scholars of the humanities) from the perspective of one such politician. The poems thus have an ambivalent relationship with Uganda’s intellectual culture, which p’Bitek tries to eschew using Lawino’s voice but also implicitly (though vehemently) defends through his portrayal of Ocol’s unjustified hatred.