Okot p'Bitek's diagnostic poetics and the quest for an African revolution in Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol

Abstract

In his introduction to Okot p"Bitek's collection of essays, "Africa's Cultural Revolution (1973), Ngugi wa Thiongó refers to p"Bitek as one of "East Africa's foremost surgeons" who is concerned with the psychological wound inflicted on a whole generation of us by colonialism and Christianity" (Ngugi 1973: xiii). This medical metaphor that Ngugi uses depicts p'Bitek as a medical practitioner whose work is aimed at healing a sick society. Before a surgeon can carry out surgery, he/she needs to know what disease is ailing the patient, needs a clear diagnosis of the problem. Diagnosis, Brown observes, has two meanings - process and category. "Process is the set of interactions which leads to the definition of the category and to imposition in particular cases," he explains while "[c]ategory is the nosologocal location in medical knowledge where the diagnosis resides" (Brown 1995, p.35), For ligen. Eva and Regehr, diagnosis refers to "a process of guiding one's thoughts by "making meaning" from data that are intrinsically dynamic, experiences idiosyncratically, negotiated among team members, and rich with opportunities for exploitation" (2016, p.435). In other wards, to diagnose a disease is to establish what it is that is ailing a person, the cause of the ailment, the circumstances surrounding the ailment ...

... This notion of colonial legacies is pertinent to this chapter because in "Song of Lawino" and "Song of Ocol", p'Bitek attributes Africa's lack of a cultural revolution to the brainwashing power og colonial education which he sees as the continent's original disease, so to speak. I focus on colonial education and how, in the writer's view it impacts on Africans' psyche and identity, to the detriment of cultural development since Western-educated people like Ocol who led African nations to independence had inhibited ideas that were hostile to the continent. This view is central to what happens in Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol ...