In this article I explore the ways in which Okot drew on the resources of Acholi culture. He used the structure and poetic features of orality in his prose and poetry, especially the song genre and the narrative style of storytelling. He explicated the content of Acoli culture in his scholarly and polemic writings, drawing on his knowledge of Acoli life-worlds. But his creative writing is also deeply ethnographic, indeed autoethnographic. Strikingly, most of his literary productivity flowered after his academic fieldwork. It was as if that scholarly effort gave him broader knowledge and deeper appreciation of the rich cultural resources he might otherwise have taken for granted. In his creative writings, his personal life experiences (biography) are blended and discernible, while the content of Acoli culture and the tensions engendered by colonialism are conveyed in sensitive detail. His academic work has garnered renewed interest in light of the decolonization discussion (Allen 2019), but his literary work is perhaps an even more powerful example of how cultural resources can be used by a gifted auto-ethnographer. It is to his novel Lak Tar and his songs that I turn attention here.
Acoli culture encompasses the language, customs, beliefs, rules, knowledge and collective identity of the Acoli people who also appear as characters in Okot’s creative writing. Resources refer to the wealth of knowledge of Acoli culture which Okot draws from and uses in his creative writing. Okot’s knowledge of Acoli social and cultural life is therefore the main resource in his creative and polemic writings. Okot the poet, like the Acoli oral poets, are feared as they use their cultural resources to either build or destroy those who do not uphold the social norms of the Acoli society.
Parental Influences
Okot’s parents were steeped in Acoli culture and yet they were Anglican converts. He thus had deep familiarity with both worlds as is reflected in his writings and cultural activism. Prior to his anthropological education, they introduced him to two important aspects of Acoli orature: folk narratives and oral songs/poetry. In his response to Lee Nichols’ question as to what elements in his family background may have had an influence in his becoming a writer and the kind of writer he became, Okot points to his informal education:
Well, both my parents were fantastic performers. I think from my father I learnt a lot of stories and style of telling stories. But from my mother I learnt a great deal about poetry, song and dance. And she was always very naughty, you know and teasing me all the time. Whenever she produced a new song she would call me and say, ‘Listen to this new.’ And the next week the song would be known throughout the village and danced and performed (Okot 1981: 243).
His early interest in the resources of Acoli culture was encouraged by his parents and especially his mother. He was, from the outset, mother’s boy especially since he was an only child and boy at that. She was both a cultural inspiration and resource for him. It is no wonder that his greatest work, published as Song of Lawino (1966) in English, and later in the Acholi original as Wer pa Lawino (1969), is dedicated to her. A further tribute to her was the inclusion of many of her songs among those that he collected during his fieldwork and published as Horn of My Love (1974). From his father, he learnt the art of narration and ‘lots of stories’, many of which he published in Hare and Hornbill (1979). Among the Acoli, the proverb is a very rich cultural resource applied in ordinary conversation, teaching moral lessons in narratives and in oral songs/poetry especially by composer-singers as a rhetorical poetic device to express emotions. Okot published his collection of proverbs in Acoli Proverbs (1985).