The amount of cash demanded by girls’ parents in the 1940s was one thousand shillings, which was difficult to get for many of the young men from poor families. Some young men who failed to raise the high bridewealth committed suicide but Okeca chose to go to the source of wealth in Buganda, the seat of the colonial government, where there were many opportunities to get paid employment. Many Acoli youth like him had gone to Kampala; some had made quick money and come back to marry while others ended up as gang members who were more in jail than out of jail. However, these failures were never talked about back home since only the successful ones came back to tell their stories. Okeca had only heard of those who made money but later when he came to Kampala, he found out some of his clansmen were living from hand to mouth with no permanent abode and some were jailbirds.
Okeca went out with thirty shillings saved by his mother from her peasant cultivation. He travelled on the bus from Gulu to Masindi Port, where he met some of his financially successful clansmen returning home. One of them gave him a knife for self-protection and indeed it became very useful in Kampala when he had to defend himself against the police and a crowd of onlookers who accused him of being a thief trying to rob an Indian Singh of thirty shillings. When he was taken to court, he pleaded not guilty and here Okot’s legal training came into play. Okeca was not shaken by the black-robed judge. He maintained his innocence and pleaded fear of the speeding motorcars. To avoid being knocked dead, he ran fast across the road and inadvertently collided violently with the Indian and knocked him down. The thirty shillings found on him were not stolen; it was the money he had come with from home. The judge admired the clarity of his statements and found him not guilty. In this episode Okot wrote his own personal life story into the novel. Okeca’s fear of the fast-moving motorcars was Okot’s own experience when his former Headmaster, Erisa Lakor, his clansman from Patiko, brought him to Kampala to join King’s College Budo in 1948 as a ‘bush-boy’ from Gulu. He was overwhelmed by the fast motorcars and the big crowd (including hawkers and thieves) moving on Kampala road.
The Acoli concept of wan acel, which I translate as ‘we are one/oneness’ holds the Acoli people together wherever they are. When Okeca arrived in Kampala, he stayed with his clansman Corporal Okello, but then, since he could not get a job in Kampala and the traditional extended family hospitality is not applicable in Kampala, he had to move out of Okello’s home. Fortunately, through the network based on wan acel, he got a fixed term contract job in Jinja at Kakira Sugar Factory as a cane cutter. Because he was hard working, he was soon promoted to the rank of headman though he was not educated. He became one of the leaders of the Acoli community at the factory. Many of the young Acoli men looked to him for guidance and support. One of the boys got tired and wanted to return home before completing his contract. This could be done if one got a letter from home informing him of death or sickness of a close relative which required his presence. The young man approached Okeca for such a letter. The trick was to have the letter written from the workplace but using the home address in Acoliland. Since Okeca could neither read nor write, he asked a Langi fellow headman called Ogwang to write the letter. Whatever grudge Ogwang had against Okeca, he used Okeca’s physical address at the Sugar Factory and this of course exposed Okeca as being part of the fraud to get Acoli boys home without completing their contracts. The Langi man admitted to having written the letter and Okeca was demoted to a casual labourer with reduction in his wage. This incident is creatively contrived by Okot to illustrate his indigenous knowledge of the old rivalry between the Acoli and Langi dating back to the migration period from Bar-el-Ghazal in South Sudan in the 1600s and the many wars the two tribes fought over territorial rights (Crazzolara 1960). Here, Okot used the historical context of the Acoli–Langi conflict as a resource.