Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of racism and emotional abuse.

George Heron writes that almost all African authors face a dilemma when it comes to language: If they use the colonial language of their country (i.e., English, French, Portuguese, etc.), they will be attempting to tell an African story in fundamentally un-African terms, but works originally written in indigenous African languages are relatively rare. He argues that although the Négritude movement, founded in the 1930s, empowered African authors to begin experimenting with how to achieve a distinctly African body of literature, their use of European languages tied their works more closely to European literature than to the traditionally oral literary forms of sub-Saharan Africa.

P’Bitek’s composition of Song of Lawino was a landmark moment in the search for an African way of writing because he used the Acholi language and emulated Acholi storytelling forms in the poem. Because of its formal familiarity, the poem is popular with the general public in Uganda as well as with academics, earning it a unique position in the African literary canon. After publishing, p’Bitek continued to experiment with his long-form “songs,” which have no direct equivalents either in the Western or African literary traditions.