Okot p'Bitek: Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol

Progress or tradition?  When I say "fuck, no" to the cisheteronormative white ableist phallic theocapitalist kyriarchy, am I just another colonizer?  Just another outsider trying to impose my beliefs on a long established culture that celebrates all the things I abhor?  When I say that religion is unequivocally harmful, and I do, am I really a paternalist know-it-all with an inflated sense of my own importance?

As ever, the problem is on its face an either/or, a dichotomy in search of a synthesis, and p'Bitek's work is a revealing study of the problem.  What is his conclusion?  Whose side is the author taking, Lawino's or Ocol's?  Is p'Bitek in favor of tradition, or progress?  It would be understandable if one took Ocol to be a straw man, a comically oblivious and deluded foil, whose only purpose is to strengthen his opponent's arguments.  It is surely not without purpose that the author paints him so clearly as a sad pawn in the political games of the Pan-African movement.  Lawino gets an undeniably more forgiving treatment: the woman wronged, the preserver of tradition, the voice of reason, not to mention around three times as many pages to make her case.

But she is wrong.  Maybe not on every level, and maybe not even in the broader intention of the work, but she is wrong, and p'Bitek does not shy away from highlighting it:

That child lying

On the earth

. . . Heavy with malarial parasites

Raging through his veins,

The mad woman

spits on the palms

Of his hands

And on his feet,

Squirts beer

On his face

to cool him,

Spills chicken blood

On his chest,

A gift to Death! (III)

 

This boy does not need chicken blood; he needs quinine.  The old ways may be lovely and touching, but they are false.  There is no disputing this.  And the new ways that Ocol is championing are not, as Lawino seems to think, some ridiculous Western intrusion.  She rails against the ridiculousness of the celibate priests; the dry, spiritless teachers who can't even dance properly.  She glories in the wild freedom of the culture she knows.  To her, of course her husband is ridiculous, learning English, desiring a Westernized moppet, wearing ludicrously impractial trousers.  Her wit is so biting, her imagery so vivid, one is seduced into thinking that she is the voice of this book.  In reality, it is Lawino who is the straw woman.  

Ocol struggles, to be sure.  His position is unsolidified, even contradictory.  He rails against Western intrusion, declaring,

To the gallows

With all the Professors

of Anthropology

And teachers of African History,

A bonfire

We'll make of their works,

We'll destroy all the anthologies

Of African literature

And close down

All the schools

Of African Studies

But it is not because they intrude that he wishes to abolish them.  It is because they remind him of something he doesn't want to see, and which he desires to escape:

 Smash all these mirrors

That I may not see

The blackness of the past

From which I came

Reflected in them (III).

One doesn't need to know that this very closely reflects p'Bitek's own stated position in life, to make the connection.   As beautiful as the old ways are, wild and free and glorious, they are wrong.  Quinine works.  Chicken blood does not.  To Lawino, this Ocol is just a colonial stooge, but to p'Bitek he seems to be more.  He is a man struggling with the reality that progress is good, but the ways in which progress wants to come are bad.  Ocol, in his poem, is on the verge of realizing what p'Bitek knows: that Leopold II, Bismarck, Livingstone and Stanley bring nothing but death with them.  But so did Mansa Sulayman, Askia, and Shaka.  None of these has the answer.  What is needed is not a Western answer to an African problem.  What is needed is "A new City on the hill" (IX),  a truly African way forward that is beholden neither to colonizers nor to ancestral spirits.  Ocol never does resolve this dilemma, and his diatribe is correspondingly inconsistent,  but somewhere in this dilemma there is an answer.