Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the Uganda Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
He wrote Song of Lawino in Acholi and then rendered it in English, and East African literature was not the same afterwards — a village wife's complaint against her husband's contempt for his own culture, in a form taken from oral poetry rather than from the English novel.
Okot p'Bitek was a teacher, an anthropologist, a singer and a footballer good enough to play for Uganda before he was a poet.
Wer pa Lawino, written in Acholi and published in English in 1966 as Song of Lawino, is the complaint of a woman whose husband has taken up with a mission-educated mistress and come to despise everything his own people do — their songs, their dances, their names for time, their way of cooking. It is funny, furious and entirely built out of Acholi oral forms, and it made the case that African literature did not have to be written in a European shape to be modern. Song of Ocol gave the husband his reply.
He wrote African Religions in Western Scholarship, attacking the anthropology that described African belief in borrowed Christian categories, ran the Uganda National Theatre and the Gulu arts festival, and taught in Kenya, Nigeria and the United States during long periods of exile. He died in 1982 at fifty. Song of Lawino has never been out of print and is taught across East Africa.
Wer pa Lawino, written in Acholi and published in English in 1966 as Song of Lawino, is the complaint of a woman whose husband has taken up with a mission-educated mistress and come to despise everything his own people do — their songs, their dances, their names for time, their way of cooking. It is funny, furious and entirely built out of Acholi oral forms, and it made the case that African literature did not have to be written in a European shape to be modern. Song of Ocol gave the husband his reply.
He wrote African Religions in Western Scholarship, attacking the anthropology that described African belief in borrowed Christian categories, ran the Uganda National Theatre and the Gulu arts festival, and taught in Kenya, Nigeria and the United States during long periods of exile. He died in 1982 at fifty. Song of Lawino has never been out of print and is taught across East Africa.
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