An unmarried man has no respect in Acoli society; therefore the orphaned Okeca embarked on the quest for bridewealth to marry his beloved Cicilia. Okot writes himself into the novel through the expansion of the theme of unrequited love because he is from a poor family. Using personal biographical information and incorporating familiar cultural knowledge makes him both an ethnographer and autoethnographer of Acoli people.
Okot the Ethnographer and Autoethnographer of Acoli Indigenous Knowledge
Okot was a Nilotic and there was no better place for him to study his Nilotic people than with renowned Africanists such as Evans-Pritchard and the Lienhardt brothers, who were authorities on the Nilotic peoples of the Sudan, and John Beattie who was an authority on the Banyoro, who are culturally closely related to the Payira clan in Acoliland (Anywar 1954).
According to Taban lo Liyong, ‘If the Quaker and Catholic Professors at Bristol’s Education Department (1956-7) blew Okot’s religious (Anglican) mind and he dropped his Anglican name Jekeri, the Oxford Africanists in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology brought to fruition Okot the cultural nationalist’ (Interview with Taban lo Liyong in Gulu on 20th August, 2011). His interest in Acoli culture was sharpened through his theoretical study of Cultural and Social Anthropology. This sharpening was ‘quickened’ through his fieldwork among the Acoli people whom he now saw differently as people who had a rich authentic culture and not primitive as the colonialists (Africanists and colonial administrators) made them (Acoli/African) feel. Thus, had Okot not been subjected to the negative attitudes of the colonialists about the Acoli (African) people, he would not have opted to study and research in the orality and social content of the Acoli people in depth. He became both an ethnographer and autoethnographer of Acoli culture unearthing its resources which he later used in his creative and academic writings.
My discussion of Okot’s extensive use of Acoli culture as resources in his writings is underpinned by the theory and practices of autoethnography, which Deborah Reed-Danahay (1997:1) defines as:
…the ethnography of one’s own group [for example the Acoli] but also to the use of personal narrative in ethnographic writing [Okot’s creative writing]…it is a genre that places the self of the researcher and/or narrator/poet within a social context. Autoethnography, broadly conceived, stands at the intersection of three genres of narration and critical reflection that may overlap in any particular work. These include: portraits of a social group the author-anthropologist is affiliated with; the life writing or other anthropological acts that incorporate ethnographic description of their social group; and anthropological writing that includes reflexive descriptions of research experiences during ethnographic fieldwork.