Prime
Titan who didn’t fit in a box
Iconic painting of the poet at the National Theatre. PHOTO BY ABUBAKER LUBOWA
What you need to know:
Star. 30 years after his death, the playwright’s influence is still as strong as it was when he was still alive. It stretches from Uganda to the end of the world.
If someone told you when they grow up, they would want to become a writer, teacher, politician, footballer, lawyer and philosopher, you would easily dismiss them as overly-ambitious. You should not, because 30 years ago, Okot P’Bitek, a man widely acclaimed for his writing prowess proved that he could be all the above. P’ Bitek - born to Opii Bitek and Lacwaa Cerina Lawino on June 9, 1931, had achieved the feat of being a jack of all trades by the time he passed on on July 20, 1982. He was 51.
Song of Lawino: The song and being a son of a mother
Okot P’Bitek is more known as the writer of Song of Lawino –an epic poem widely read and studied in the song school of poetry. The original manuscript of Song of Lawino was submitted in 1956 to the East African Literature Bureau as Wer Pa Lawino –written in his native Acholi language, but was rejected by the publisher. P’Bitek later lost the manuscript among other papers but re-discovered it in the 1960s and re-wrote it with an English translation. It was published in 1967.
In the song, P’Bitek brings out the conflict between the Acholi worldview and the worldview that colonialism introduced to his people. The song satirises the westernised African woman and seems to sympathise with the traditional Acholi woman who has lost her husband’s favour to her westernised rival.
The song shows the deep connection P’Bitek’s literary voice has with his mother. From the name of the main character Lawino, similar to his own mother’s to the style, P’Bitek the writer is a real son of a mother. His mother was after all, on top of being a head of the girls in the chiefdom, a song composer in Acholiland. In fact, some of the songs that P’Bitek included in the collection Horn of my Love were composed by his mother.
The influence of family and community on P’Bitek’s work goes beyond the mother. His father was a dedicated community man who participated in tribal fights, things that would later seep into P’Bitek’s worldview.
The teacher and footballer
P’Bitek’s first professional training was in teaching –having enrolled at Mbarara Teachers Training College. He had earlier studied at Kings College Budo. In 1953, he was recruited to teach English and Religious Education at Sir Samuel Baker School, Gulu, where besides teaching he was responsible for sports and cultural activities in the school.
While at Mbarara TTC, P’Bitek had been selected to the Uganda National Football team. He continued to play for the team even while he was a teacher at Sir Samuel Baker School until 1956 when he left with the team to play in London.
The team became famous for playing barefoot at the games, but most importantly for P’Bitek, who picked interest in the University of Bristol and stayed on in Britain.
While, there P’Bitek studied Christianity- resulting in his dropping of his Christian name Jekeri (after Ezekiel).
Lawyer, philosopher and anthropologist
P’Bitek moved to the University of Wales, at Aberystwyth where he studied for a Bachelor of Laws degree. During the course, he had a stint at the International Court of Justice as part of his studies. He was registered in the Middle Temple, keeping terms and eating dinners as part of the process of becoming a barrister when the passion and interest about his own people the Acholi, Ugandans and Africans pushed him off the path of lawyering. On the advice of his professor, P’Bitek proceeded to Oxford University to study Social Anthropology, in line with his interest in African affairs.
At Oxford, P’Bitek noted the “insulting” language the white professors used that divided the world into two, the civilised West and the rest who were savages, primitives, uncivilised, crude, rude, un-progressive etc. Despite the dissatisfaction, even with the theories he was being taught, he still got the Certificate in Anthropology before embarking on the study of Oral Tradition among the Acholi and Langi, believing that through songs, stories, proverbs and chants of the people, he would understand what their philosophy of life is. This academic work resulted in the award of the degree of Bachelor of Letters (B.Litt) in 1963.
P’Bitek’s name in the Anthropology field was cemented at Oxford. His expertise in the area is validated by the quality of the monographs he has written, from African Religions in Western Scholarship to the Religion of the Central Luo.
From his works on Philosophy and Anthropology, P’Bitek insists that culture is a philosophy of a people and that culture is lived contrary to what is discussed in lecture theatres, seen on shows and museums.
P’Bitek left the department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Makerere University, which he had joined in 1963, to serve Northern Uganda, including Bunyoro, Lango, Acholi, Karamoja and West Nile. While there, he organised festivals for rural and urban artists.
He carried this habit to the University of Nairobi, Kenya-where he was exiled. He became a brain of the Kisumu Arts Festivals and headed the Extra-Mural department of the university.
P’Bitek was also the first African Director of the National Cultural Center (also known as the National Theater), appointed in 1966. It was probably this experience that informed much of his critique of some views of culture as a commodity and object. It was commonplace for people at his home to just break into song and dance with or without occasion.
At one time, residents of the Gulu Senior Quarters complained that P’Bitek was hosting so many people disturbing the peace of the residential area, a charge he laughed at and stubbornly refused to relocate. While in Nigeria, he would mingle with students for drinks at the bar.
In his easy-going life, P’Bitek’s genius shone. From his experience of life, his art came. One time, after getting drunk at a friends’ place, he is said to have disturbed train passengers with noise on his way back home. He was reported to the police and locked up.
The story goes that in the morning, he asked to talk to the local authorities so he could contact his wife, thereby shocking his jailers who imagined they had jailed a vagrant and not a prominent man.
That experience is what inspired the Song of Prisoner that P’Bitek wrote on the weekend following the murder of Tom Mboya, the Kenyan politician who was a drinking companion.
In 1979, after the ouster of Idi Amin’s regime, P’Bitek was among those exiles who returned to Uganda. P’Bitek had left Uganda in 1968. In exile, he had done more academic and literary writing, and had worked at different universities in Kenya, USA and Nigeria, teaching Literature among other postings. After 11 years in exile and engaging in diverse academic endeavors, P’Bitek’s application to re-join Makerere University as a professor, left the powers that be at the university confused as to what exact department to post him.
“There was this bogus and sometimes annoying argument which goes; ‘Okot, but where do you actually belong to? In Sociology or Literature or Religion, or Philosophy or Law?,’” he wrote in an open letter responding to a posting as a two-year Research Fellow to the Makerere Institute of Social Research which he considered as being dumped, the way a broken lorry is.
To P’Bitek, “to narrow down a scholar, an intellectual to one discipline is to choke intellect and scholarship, to disrupt the flourishing of thought, to disable the university from producing thinkers.”
He was, finally in 1982 honoured with an appointment as the first professor of creative writing at Makerere University’s Department of Literature. One thinks that in making this appointment, the university authorities considered P’Bitek’s insistence on the fact that of all the work to be done in the African academia, original and creative thinking is the most difficult.
“Let our professors and lecturers and leaders stop engaging in small and wasteful, even childish activities like backbiting others, and begin to reflect seriously on the predicament in this part of the world,” he wrote. That very year, 1982, on July 20, P’Bitek died at his residence in Kampala.
P’Bitek, who had relentlessly rejected the compartmentalisation and categorisation of man in his own life was buried in the church cemetery of Gulu, a fact that those who knew him, like Willy Mutunga, now chief justice of Kenya, have bemoaned as disrespect to the man, who dedicated a good part of his intellectual life rubbishing several claims made by Christianity.
Mutunga said if he had his way, he would exhume the remains of P’Bitek and remove him from the Christian box in which he was fixed. July 20, 1982 marked 30 years of “boxing” down the remains of a son of his mother, singer, poet, novelist, teacher, politician, footballer, lawyer, philosopher and anthropologist to a coffin and grave in a church cemetery.
However, there are things about P’Bitek that cannot be “boxed” and buried - his signature voice and style, his incisive views and his influence in the study of religion, Africa, literature and everything else he touched.
Education
He was educated at Gulu High School then King’s College, Budo, and later at universities in the United Kingdom. At school he was noted as a singer, dancer, drummer and athlete; he composed and directed an opera while at college.
