After carefully ensuring that he got all his savings from the Indian managers, Okeca escaped from the sugarcane factory through the plantation to Jinja railway station. His argument for breaking his contract was that he voluntarily came to work in the sugarcane factory, and he could also voluntarily leave the job. His moral conscience was clear: he was only exercising his free will based on the Acoli philosophy of ‘an kena atiyo ki tamma…I alone can exercise my free will.’
Passing through Kampala, his hard-earned cash was stolen from him at the bus station by a clever thief who cut the money out of the pocket where he had sewn it. He didn’t realize the theft until he reached Masindi Port and had no money for the last leg of the journey to Gulu. All the Acoli men he asked for help refused and he walked the last 15 miles back to Gulu arriving poorer than he left home. The narrative cycle is complete: no bridewealth and no marriage.
Okot combined the Acoli narrative technique as a resource with his personal knowledge of the story of the young man and recreated it into a novel, also writing himself into it. Okeca’s first encounter with the fast-moving vehicles in the big city, Kampala, is dramatic and could only be narrated by Okot who had a similar experience when he was taken to Budo by his former Headmaster, Erisa Lakor. Okeca’s suffering in the course of looking for the bridewealth is Okot’s criticism of enlightened Acoli parents who were ‘selling’ their daughters to enrich themselves. This criticism is also found in Reuben Anywar’s Acoli Ki Ker Megi (1954) which documents the history and culture of the Acoli culture under different chiefdoms. The Acoli Local Government and the traditional leaders had by-laws regulating the amount (akumu) to be paid, but many parents, including the administrators of the by-laws, ignored them. (Currently, there are new by-laws recently passed by the Acoli traditional leaders to curb the current high bridewealth [Kalokwera 2021].)
When the marriage breaks down, the girl’s parents were required to return the bridewealth but many failed as they had used the money to marry wives for their sons or spent on other social amenities. Okot illustrates this scenario when his own marriage to Mary Anek broke down in 1966. He asked her family to return the bridewealth he paid for her. Since her father could not pay back, Anek wrote him a cheque and this is beautifully captured in the poem, ‘Return the Bridewealth’ (Cook and Rubadiri 1971: 130-131):
I tell the woman I cannot trace her father.
I say to her I want back the bridewealth that my father paid
When we wedded some years ago…
The woman reaches out for her hand bag
[…]
She takes out a new purse,
She takes out a cheque
[…]
She screams,
Here, take it! Go marry your bloody woman!
I open the cheque
It reads,
Shillings One thousand four hundred only.
Okot said he happily cashed the cheque and spent the money. Many other people are not as lucky as Okot in getting their bridewealth back. Where there are children in the marriage, the man does not push too hard for his bridewealth since he takes custody of the children if the woman decides to remarry.