The Acoli attach cultural values to the names they give their children. Naming ceremonies are part of the rites of passage in a child’s life. On the third day a male child is named according to the names (nying pen) either predetermined by the circumstance of the birth or conception or names selected for him by the parents or relatives. Some of the predetermined names include those related to Jok as Okot explains or those due to circumstances of conception such as Okumu/Akumu where the mother conceived immediately after menstruation when conception is least expected (safe period). This makes Okumu/Akumu a child of Jok just like Opiyo/Apiyo/Ocen/Acen (twins) and Okello/Akello, the child who follows twins. The name(s) given that day is called nying pen because that is the day when the umbilical cord is cut and buried as part of the ceremony. That home becomes the home of the child who will in future claim partial ownership since his pen is buried in the compound. The explanation I have given here applies to the female child who is named on the fourth day after her birth. Twins have a more elaborate naming ceremony as they are special children of Jok. Their burial too is different from the other non-children of Jok, a subject Okot discusses in detail in Religion of Central Lwo (1973).
Healing and cleansing
In Section 13, ‘Let Them Prepare the Malakwang Dish’, Okot displays his knowledge of Acoli traditional medicines with their various healing properties as resource. Here Lawino, having painstakingly identified Ocol’s illness as due to his wholesale acceptance of colonialism, proposes the healing process including the restoration of his manhood. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, as cited by Sylvester Danson Kahyana (2017) refers to Okot as one of East African’s foremost surgeons concerned with ‘the psychological wound inflicted on a whole generation by colonialism and Christianity’ (Ngugi 1973: xiii). Okot the surgeon empowered Lawino, his mouthpiece and medicine woman, to prescribe Acoli traditional medicines to heal his patient Ocol and his fellow middle class educated Acoli. Lawino begins by ensuring that the patient is not:
…utterly dead
And fit only for the stomach of the earth,
If your heart string
Is not completely cut,
…
If some blood is still flowing
However faintly
Take courage
Take a small amount of porridge,
Let them prop you up
Drink some fish soup
Slowly, slowly
You will recover. (SoL, 120)
It is only after this initial diagnosis and feeding treatment which revives the patient that the actual ceremonial healing process begins. Okot, drawing on the medical resources of Acoli culture, sets in motion a full treatment process followed by a ritual sacrifice of a bull at the ancestral shrine performed by elders; begging forgiveness from his mother for insulting her and her generation of relatives; removing the selfish road block he had imposed on Lawino and finally a request from Lawino to Ocol to let her dance before him. I will only present a few examples of the traditional medicine and what it cures in Ocol’s ‘psychological wound’ inflicted by colonialism and Christianity: