Pumpkins in Uganda - The Songs of Lawino and Ocol
In my recent search for epics from around the world I stumbled on Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol by Ugandan author Okot p'Bitek. Song of Lawino came out first but the two works are often published together as they are in direct dialog with each other.
I thought they were both incredible. I absolutely recommend them and they are a brisk and compelling read. They are also important poems by a major East African author and are still widely read in Africa today.
And now going to talk about them.
Background
Song of Lawino was written in the Acoli language of northern Uganda in the 1960s. It was translated into English by Okot himself and that version was published in 1966. The Acoli version was published in 1969. Song of Ocol was written in English and published in 1970.
Song of Lawino is a lament by a woman named Lawino about how her husband Ocol has scorned both her and his traditional Ugandan heritage by fully adopting Western European customs and being dismissive of his own people's traditions. Song of Ocol is Ocol's response to his wife.
A Brief Biography of Okot p'Bitek
Note about surnames: I'm mostly sure that Okot is the author's surname, not p'Bitek. Some things refer to him as p'Bitek but the two pieces of specialist scholarship I found, including the introduction to the edition I have, refer to him as "Okot." I will refer to him as such as well.
Okot p'Bitek (1931-1982) was a Ugandan writer and polymath who also composed music, danced, and played soccer. He trained as a teacher in Mbarara, Uganda. He later joined the Ugandan national soccer team which allowed him to travel and eventually lead him to Great Britain. He stayed in the UK to study, getting degrees in Education and Law in England and Wales, respectively. He then went on to study social anthropology at Oxford.
After Uganda's independence Okot went back and taught at Makerere University in Kampala. He eventually was dismissed from his position because of the criticism of the government in his writings and he went on to teach in Kenya, Nigeria, and the United States.
In 1982 he returned to Uganda to teach Creative Writing at Makerere University but died of a stroke shortly afterwards.
Okot wrote novels, poems, and non-fiction works about Acoli culture and folklore.
According to the Antonette Clarke Akalanne in an article for Bristol Museum:
Okot p’Bitek is regarded as one of the most famous African creative writers. ... [Song of Lawino] is regarded as the most widely-read literary work originating in sub-Saharan Africa.
A Brief Sidebar about Uganda
Uganda is a country in East Africa bordering Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, South Sudan, Rwanda, and Tanzania. It's a diverse country of about 45 million people with more than 10 different ethnic groups. Kampala is the capital and largest city with almost 2 million people. Uganda's official language is English with Swahili as a secondary official language.
The seed of the country was the Buganda kingdom in what is now southern Uganda which was founded sometime around the 13th Century and by the 19th Century was a powerful state in the Great Lakes region of East Africa. During the European colonial grabs in what is known as the Scramble for Africa, Buganda was made a Protectorate of England. England then added some territory to the Protectorate, which expanded it to encompass modern day Uganda.
A protectorate is different than a colony in that a colony is generally considered part of the colonizing nation and has no real autonomy. A protectorate is theoretically still an independent state with control of its internal administration but whose foreign affairs are dictated by the colonizing power. Britain had protectorates and colonies all over Africa. Uganda did not have a substantial English settler population, unlike Kenya right next door, which was a British colony.
Uganda gained independence in 1962. Post independence politics in Uganda was pretty rough and quickly devolved into authoritarianism with the first elected prime minister, Milton Obote, suspending the constitution and declaring himself president in 1966. Uganda had been a parliamentary system with a ceremonial president but after Obote took power the constitution was re-written to give him executive authority. Obote himself was overthrown by Idi Amin in 1971. Idi Amin was a brutal dictator who killed hundreds of thousands of Ugandans during his eight year rule.
After Amin's ouster, Obote returned as president but was deposed again in 1985 after an extended civil war where his government killed hundreds of thousands of people. Since 1986 Uganda has been ruled by the Yoweri Museveni in a dictatorial one party state.
Given the fraught and authoritarian political realities of Uganda in the 1960s, I suppose it isn't surprising that Okot p'Bitek ran afoul of the government.
Mechanics
Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol are long poems, with the former being about 96 pages and the later about 30 pages. As they are essentially a domestic conversation between two people, albeit one that discusses wider cultural issues, they probably aren't technically 'epics' but the words 'long poem' and 'epic' are so intertwined, at least in Western culture, that I wouldn't begrudge anyone calling them epics.
Language
Note that in Acoli, Song of Lawino is Wer pa Lawino; If I refer to it by its Acoli name I am specifically talking about the original Acoli version.
Acoli is part of the Nilotic language family, whose languages are spoken by peoples near the Nile River in East Africa, which runs from Lake Victoria in Uganda to the Mediterranean Sea via the Sudans and Egypt. There's somewhere between 30 and 55 languages in this family, some of which are mutually intelligible and some are not. (Language is complicated so it can be hard to determine what counts as a distinct language and what counts as just a dialect.)
Acoli is spoken by about 1.5 million people mostly in northern Uganda. It's a tonal language, meaning that the words don't just get their meaning from the vowels and consonants but also from the pitch movement the syllables are spoken with. So for example in Mandarin, another tonal language, the syllable "ma" said with a high steady tone means "mother" but with a falling tone it means "scold," and with a rising tone it means "hemp." Different languages have different pitch contour vocabularies which in linguistics are called "tones." To give a few examples, Acoli and Vietnamese have six tones. Mandarin has five.
To give a sense of what the poem looks like in Acoli, here's an excerpt from the introduction to the Waveland Press edition. ("c" in Acoli sounds like "ch")
Timme ducu lutimme Munu-Munu
Ping'o lewic pe mako Munu,
Lukwako dako atyer, calo Munu
Luting'o pong' kor, calo Munu
Wumato taa cigara, calo Munu,
Form
You can see in the above excerpt that in the Acoli text there is a lot of consonance, repetition and rhyme in a fairly regular meter.
Per G.A. Heron in the introduction to the Waveland Press edition, while Okot p'Bitek was writing Wer pa Lawino "in a period in his life when he was daily concerned with Acoli traditional songs" one should be cautious about overstating the connection:
Okot's 'Songs' are not songs in any literal sense. You cannot sing them. They are not simply a written version of Acoli songs. Acoli songs do not grow to book length. They are one or two verses repeated with musical accompaniment. They are not written down under one person's authorship. They are sung and adapted by singer after singer, and each singer is free to create in his own way and change the song to fit current events or refer to his own girlfriend. They do not use rhyme or the regular rhythm used in Wer pa Lawino.
In his English translation, Okot chose to use unrhymed verse without a regular meter. It does flow well but it's not a rigid form. Per Heron, Okot also reduced some of the repetition. To go back to previous excerpt, every line ends in "Munu" which means "white person" and the except I used was only half of the passage. So there's ten lines in the Acoli that end in "Munu," of which only 3 make it into the English version:
You kiss her on the cheek
As white people do,
You kiss her open-sore lips
As white people do
You suck the slimy saliva
From each other's mouths
As white people do.
- Chapter 3 (p44)
There is also a lot of untranslated Acoli vocabulary, especially in Song of Lawino, like the words "Lacukuku," "odye," and "lacomi." They're not load bearing and I mostly got the sense from the context but it's interesting that Okot didn't Anglicize any references, even in places where the literal English translation would be strange to a Western reader.
The most obvious example is how Jesus is referred to as "the Hunchback" which per footnote is because
The name of the Christian God in [Acoli] is Rubanga. This is also the name of the ghost that causes tuberculosis of the spine, hence Hunchback.
An Acoli audience would understand this immediately but an English speaking audience that didn't know anything about Acoli culture wouldn't get it. I think it's really interesting (and thematically relevant, more on this later) that Okot did not sand down the Ugandan specificity in the translation.
The translation gives the impression that even in a Western language it is still an African poem for an African audience.
Structure
Song of Lawino contains 13 chapters, though Wer pa Lawino had 14, the last of which Okot did not include in his English translation. The first two chapters set up the interpersonal conflicts between Lawino and Ocol, where she laments how cruelly he speaks to her. The next ten expand into more philosophical territory and then final chapter is Lawino's plea for Ocol to return, both to her and to his culture.
The chapter titles in Song of Lawino are taken from actual lines in the chapters and are all amazing. Like "The Graceful Giraffe Cannot Become a Monkey" or "My Husband's House is a Dark Forest of Books." The philosophical chapters each deal with a concept related to he differences between Acoli and English culture, and what Lawino doesn't understand about the latter or its appeal for Africans. These chapters are usually built around a variation of "I do not understand white people's X", like "I do not understand the dances of white people" or "I do not know how to keep the white man's time." This is done in explicit statements in some chapters, like the ones I just quoted, or implicitly like in the chapter about African women changing their hair to be more like white women's, which can be distilled as "I don't understand why Africans try to look like white people."
Song of Ocol has 9 chapters that are all much shorter than Lawino's. Ocol, despite his song in theory being a response to his wife, only actually addresses her twice, once at the very start and once very briefly later.
Ocol's first lines are:
Woman,
Shut up!
Pack your things
Go!
- Chapter 1 (p121)
He then very quickly pivots to bitter attacks on Africa and Africans in what I'm tempted to call a screed.
Ocol's chapters do not have titles; he doesn't have time for poetry.
The Writing
Both Songs are full of evocative and powerful writing.
An example from Song of Lawino:
When the sun has grown up
And the poisoned tips
Of its arrows painfully bite
The backs of the men hoeing
And of the women weeding or harvesting.
This is when
You take drinking water
To the workers.
- Chapter 7 (p64)
And another:
The evaporating vapour
From the many drinks,
The steaming sweat
The hot wet breaths
Of the numerous people,
The coughs and saliva
Squirted by sneezing drunken sick,
The many brands
Of winds broken,
Humid winds broken by men and women
Producing various types of smells,
The dust
The evaporating piss ...
The air is heavy like the hammer.
- Chapter 3 (p45)
And here's one from Song of Ocol:
The balloon of
The African Personality
Exploded long ago,
DuBois is dead
We will erect
No memorial for him;
Why should I care
Who built the citadel
Of Zimbabwe?
Of what relevance is it
Whether black men
Architected the Pyramid?
Smash all these mirrors
That I may not see
The blackness of the past
From which I came
Reflected in them.
- Chapter 3 (p129)
Narrative Voices
Something that I think is really great about these Songs is how Lawino and Ocol sound like different people. The two sections have very different narrative voices.
Lawino is quite blunt and uninhibited without being performative. She freely talks about sex, bodies, and bodily fluids with no embarrassment and no intent to provoke. Bodies and bodily functions just are what they are. She also uses some unexpected and specific imagery in general. For example:
On the face of the clock
There are writings
And it's large single testicle
Dangles below.
It goes this way and that way
Like a sausage-fruit In a windy storm.
- Chapter 7 (p63)
Lawino may not be formally educated but she is clearly an intelligent and perceptive narrator working through her thoughts in a reasoned and unhurried manner. This languid pace also fits with her character; in Chapter 7 she lays out how she does not understand why white people are so fixated on the artificial divisions of the clock and obsessed with not wasting time. And don't misunderstand: Song of Lawino is a quick read, even if the character's thoughts are expressed with deliberation.
Ocol, on the other hand, is clipped, and full of anger. He is much more direct than the casually poetic Lawino and is on the attack for the entire poem. You can almost feel the venom and fury squeezing out of his words.
Woman
Your song
Is rotting buffalo
Left behind by
Fleeing poachers,
Its nose blocked
With house-flies
Sucking bloody mucus,
The eyes
Two lumps of green-flies
Feasting on crusts
Of salty tears,
Maggots wallowing
In the pus
In the spear wounds;
- Chapter 1 (p122)
Like with Lawino, there are nice little touches that reflect Ocol's character. For example, unlike Lawino he makes some Western references, mentioning the Egyptians in the Red Sea and a version of the the Book of Isaiah's "the leopard will lie down with the goat." (He says "lions" and "antelopes.")
Ocol also offers Lawino an aspirin, consistent with Lawino's earlier lament about his virulent rejection of traditional medicines. I also very much like that Okot didn't put a huge spotlight on this; it's just something Ocol offers offhand before moving on. Ocol's Westernization is so complete, so integrated into his character that he references the Bible and modern medicine without even thinking about it.
Points of Interest
Let no one uproot the pumpkin - Traditional Culture and Westernization
The most obvious theme of these works is the tension between the continuance of cultural traditions and the rejection of them, in this case in favor of Western culture. This is not subtext, this is quite literally what the poems are about.
One of the more persistent images in the poems is the pumpkin. Several times throughout her song, Lawino references the Acoli proverb:
The pumpkin in the old homestead
Must not be uprooted
- Chapter 2 (p41)
G.A. Heron explains the proverb this way:
Pumpkins are a luxury food. They grow wild throughout Acoliland. To uproot pumpkins, even when you are moving to a new homestead, is simple wanton destruction. In this proverb, then, Lawino is not asking Ocol to cling to everything in his past, but rather not to destroy things for the sake of destroying them. Again, the refrain is used to emphasise an important idea the writer is putting across in the whole poem.
Lawino in generał, despite her criticisms of Western culture, does have a surprising "live and let live" attitude towards it. She says things like:
My husband,
I do not complain
That you eat
White men's foods.
If you enjoy them
Go ahead!
Shall we just agree
To have freedom
To eat what one likes?
- Chapter 6 (p63)
She even says that she "used to admire him speaking in English," (Chapter 2, p36) an admiration that no doubt ceased once he started to denigrate her with it. Lawino's issue is mostly Ocol's vicious and proselytizing rejection of tradition.
The last line of her song is "Let no one uproot the pumpkin."
Ocol's response shows that for him, unlike for Lawino, there can be no different strokes for different folks. His is the language of destruction.
To hell
With your Pumpkins
And your Old Homesteads,
To hell
With the husks
Of old traditions
And meaningless customs,
We will smash
The taboos
One by one,
Explode the basis
Of every superstition,
We will uproot
Every sacred tree
And demolish every ancestral shrine
- Chapter 3 (p126)
There can be no quarter and no coexistence and not just for him. He means to purify Africa which he sees as a diseased thing. In his own words:
What is Africa
To me?
Blackness,
Deep, deep fathomless
Darkness;
Africa,
Idle giant
Basking in the sun,
Sleeping, snoring,
Twitching in dreams;
Diseased with a chronic illness,
Choking with black ignorance,
Chained to the rock
Of poverty,
- Chapter 2 (p125)
Ocol's views of Africa echo what Okot p'Bitek's saw from his teachers when he studied Social Anthropology in Oxford, England. As Heron says:
In [Okot's] Preface to his book African Religions in Western Scholarship, he tells us of his conflicts with his teachers:
During the very first lecture... the teacher kept referring to Africans or non-Western peoples as barbarians, savages, primitive tribes, etc. I protested, but to no avail...
Ocol doesn't really respond to any of Lawino's points in any reasoned way and mostly just spews abuse and threats.
In Heron's view:
If Song of Ocol is a reply to Song of Lawino then it is a bad one. Okot raises controversial issues in his poems, but he only puts one point of view in the controversy. ... These two poems are not the thesis and antithesis of the argument, from which the reader can deduce a synthesis. Unlike some other African writers, Okot doesn't consider a cultural synthesis to be the solution to Africa's problems. He wishes to borrow technology from Europe, but not culture. Okot has very little sympathy with Ocol, so he makes Ocol reply in a clumsy way. Song of Ocol does not fairly represent an alternative to Lawino's point of view.
It's also a nice touch that Song of Ocol was only written in English. It's a neat way to emphasize that Ocol has adopted the West so completely that he doesn't even deign to use the language of his heritage.
Politics and Uhuru
Both Lawino and Ocol speak of "uhuru" which is a Swahili word meaning "freedom" or "independence." Unsurprisingly, Ocol sees himself and his party comrades as the agents of uhuru who singularly brought freedom and are thus owed deference. He lords his self-appointed status over his countrymen, saying to them:
Do you not know me
And my brothers-in-power?
- Chapter 6 (p138)
He contrasts his serious Western studies with the rural people's frivolous dancing, time wasting, and savagery and he arrogantly dismisses them as free loaders. As he says:
What was your contribution In the struggle for uhuru?
- Chapter 6 (p138)
This sense of ownership and dominance is at least partly why he feels he is entitled to destroy cultural customs and determine the only path forward for Uganda. Lawino points out the hypocrisy of Ocol and his compatriots using the language of freedom and unity in public while using the language of division and destruction in private.
Ocol himself is disdainful, frequently violating the Acoli customs of hospitality and comity, and has destroyed his own family relationships, both with his own brother and Lawino herself. Lawino sees this not as an isolated personal issue of her husband's but a pervasive issue with the Western educated political elite.
As she says:
I do not understand
The meaning of Uhuru!
I do not understand
Why all the bitterness
And the cruelty
And the cowardice,
The fear,
The deadly fear that
Eats the hearts
Of the political leaders!
- Chapter 11 (p107)
In one of the most powerful and depressing assessments of power in the aftermath of independence, she says:
Someone said
Independence falls like a bull buffalo
And the hunters
Rush to it with drawn knives,
Sharp shining knives
For carving the carcass.
- Chapter 11 (p107)
Religion
Lawino raises some prescient observations in Chapters "8 - I am Ignorant of the Good Word in the Clean Book" and "9 - From the Mouth of Which River?" both of which tackle religion in the new order. Christianity is the predominant religion in Uganda, with about 40% being Catholics and 30% Protestants.
Lawino has sampled both Protestant church and Catholic catechism classes. She sums up her experience with:
But the teachers of religion
Hate questions;
A young tree that is bending
They do not like to straighten.
Whether they do it purposely,
Whether they themselves
Have no answers
I do not know,
But I know
They hate questions.
- Chapter 9 (p90)
This is similar to how Ocol will not allow Western cultural supremacy be interrogated and I suppose Lawino sees this inability to tolerate questions as a feature that permeates that culture.
She also fairly points out the hypocrisy in her husband, and by extension the Church, being dismissive of what they see as ridiculous primitive beliefs without leveling the same scrutiny to their own.
My husband despises me
Because I fear
The kite with the flame
In its anus.
He says
No such things exist.
It is my eyes
That are sick
And only foolish superstitions
Make me see these things.
But my husband believes
Some people see
The beautiful men
With the wings of vultures
Flying through the air!
- Chapter 9 (p92)
For Lawino, no one corners the market on absurdity in matters of faith.
One last thing I thought was interesting was how both Lawino and Ocol describe Christianity as created by and for white people. Lawino describes the Biblical figures Peter, Joseph, and Luke as "the ancestors of white men." And this is not just Lawino misunderstanding, she also relates how Ocol similarly characterizes Christianity:
Ocol tells me
Things I cannot understand,
He talks
About a certain man, Jesus.
He says
The man was born
Long ago
In the country of white men.
- Chapter 7 (p73)
This kind of white washing is pervasive in American culture at least and it's sad to see it also coming from an African man so proud of his Western education.
Some Points of Ambivalence
As Heron said in the introduction, Ocol's song is not an effective response to Lawino. He's mostly a dismissive dick and Okot p'Bitek is not on his side. But I did have some moments of ambivalence in both songs.
The sections in Song of Lawino where Lawino talks about modern medicine and books are hard for me get behind and I wonder, based on the following line from Heron's introduction, whether Okot perhaps isn't quite on board with Lawino here either:
[Okot[ wishes to borrow technology from Europe, but not culture.
That idea is difficult to square with Lawino's rejection of Western medicine and her surety that sickness is caused by human evil like the curses of sorcerers and shadow trappers. As for the traditional remedies, I'm sad to say I mostly agree with Ocol on this one, As Lawino says:
My husband agrees
That sometimes by accident
Some of the herbs are effective
- Chapter 10 (p93)
Ocol is still a giant jerk about it and Lawino rightfully skewers him for insisting she's an idiot for praying to her ancestors but then turning around and saying they should pray to Christian saints.
And, as a lover of books, this line from Lawino about her distrust of them makes me kind of sad:
My husband's house
Is a mighty forest of books,
Dark it is and very damp,
The steam rising from the ground
Hot thick and poisonous
Mingles with the corrosive dew
And the rain drops
That have collected in the leaves.
- Chapter 11 (p114)
I do understand, though, that from her perspective all the Western books did poison her husband.
In Song of Ocol, I thought Ocol's sentiment on his cultures traditional treatment of women was surprising. He says to them:
In Buganda
They buy you
With two pots
Of beer,
The Luo trade you
For seven cows,
...
They purchase you
On hire purchase even,
Like bicycles,
You are furniture,
Mattress for man
Your arm
A pillow
For his head!
Woman of Africa
Whatever you call yourself,
Whatever the bush poets
Call you
You are not
A wife!
- Chapter 4 (p134)
I'd say this is perhaps the least aggressively polemical section of Song of Ocol and it felt to me like one of the only parts where he was making a decent point without being a massive prick.
Self Erasure
In his final chapter, Ocol says this:
We shall build
A new City on the hill
Overlooking the Lake,
Concrete, steel, stone ...
The termite queen-mother
Will starve to death ...
Broad avenues, spacious gardens,
Parks, swimming pools...
We will erect monuments
To the founders
Of modern Africa:
Leopold II of Belgium,
Bismarck ...
-Chapter 9 (p151)
...
Jesus, dude.
Proudly honoring Leopold II of Belgium is a horrifying thing for anyone to pitch but especially for an African at the expense of honoring African leaders. Leopold's regime in the Congo Free State killed and mutilated millions of people for profit. That Ocol has internalized his Western education so much as to want to honor this man is possibly the biggest tragedy of these Songs. (Check out Adam Hochschild's book King Leopold's Ghost for more about why this is terrible.)
This is Ocol's closing argument, too, the culmination of his song. He proceeds to then almost eagerly hope for the obliteration of Africans from history, saying things like
Let the kings of Ghana
Rot in the earth,
-Chapter 9 (p151)
He ends with this line:
What proud poem
Can we write
For the vanquished?
-Chapter 9 (p151)
Gallimaufry
Makerere University, where Okot p'Bitek taught (and Ocol studied) is Uganda's largest and oldest institution of higher learning, first established as a technical school in 1922, and is the oldest currently active university in East Africa
I have no idea who G.A. Heron is. They are referenced in a lot of places that talk about the Song of Lawino and the Song of Ocol, mostly by quoting their introduction to the Waveland edition, but I can't find out anything about them.
I like this line from Lawino, asking her husband to repent and come back to her:
Brush your tongue
So thickly coated with bitter insults;
Here is warm water
There is some salt in it,
Gargle it,
Clean your mouth,
Spit out the insults with the water!
The abuses you learnt
From your white masters
And the stupid stubbornness
Spit them down with the water.
- Chapter 13 (p119)
I think I'm not the only one who is unsure of the protocol for referring to Okot p'Bitek by his surname. In her article for Bristol Museum, Antonette Clarke Akalanne only refers to him by his full name to the point where it really feels like she's hedging her bets.
This line from Lawino still resonates today:
If only the parties
Would fight poverty
With the fury
With which they fight each other,
If diseases and ignorance
Were assaulted
With the deadly vengeance
With which Ocol assaults his mother's son,
The enemies would have been
Greatly reduced by now.
- Chapter 11 (p111)
G.A. Heron makes a neat observation about the composition of Wer pa Lawino:
Okot wrote the Acoli version of Song of Lawino in a period in his life when he was daily concerned with Acoli traditional songs, both in his research and in his activities in connection with the Gulu Festival. In his work for the Festival, he co-operated very closely with a large group of friends. These are some of the people whose help he acknowledged on the title pages of Song of Lamino. Naturally when Okot was writing his poem he also worked together with these friends. He read new versions of each chapter of the poem to these people as soon as they were completed, and their comments were taken into account if the chapter needed rewriting. Thus even its method of composition is similar to that of traditional songs. A group of singers work together and continuously alter the songs as they perform them.
I saw an interesting article that talked about how tonal languages are clustered around humid areas of Earth and that they are really rare in drier climates. The thought is that the humidity helps you hit the pitches better.
In June of 2023 a stage adaptation of Song of Lawino, called Echoes of Lawino, was performed at Uganda's National theater. Okot p'Bitek was the first African director of that venue and his portrait hangs in the green room. Echoes of Lawino's director Kitaka Wa Kavalu said:
I won’t lie, it’s a mixed feeling of fear and excitement directing a play based on a book whose writer directed stage plays and managed the same space.
A sad line from Song of Ocol that captures the depths of Ocol's self-hatred:
Mother, mother,
Why,
Why was I born
Black?
- Chapter 2 (p126)
Per G.A. Heron:
In some circles in East Africa, the words Lawino and Ocol have become common nouns. You will hear the 'Ocols' or the "Lawinos' of Africa praised or condemned in many arguments.
I'd say that's a heck of testament to the impact of Okot p'Bitek's work.
Lawino has a pretty funny misunderstanding of the Christian eucharist.
O! Protestants eat people!
They are all wizards,
They exhume corpses for dinner!
- Chapter 8 (p75)
Though I guess if you believe in transubstantiation, the belief that the communion bread literally becomes the body of Christ during Communion, then I guess she's not wrong.
Lawino also has this very funny line when describing the Catholics:
The Padré and the Nun are the same,
They only quarrel
They are angry with me
As if it was I
Who prevented them marrying.
- Chapter 9 (p85)
Conclusion
Please read these poems. They are extraordinary and collected editions are in print and not all that hard to scare up.
That Okot p'Bitek delivered such a compelling exploration of cultural tension in a fragile post independence setting via what's essentially a domestic conversation is really incredible.
It really sucks that Okot is not more widely known in the West. He deserves to be.
The pumpkin in the old homestead must not be uprooted.
-m
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