The televised version of Uganda's independence day in Kampala on 9 October 1962 featured the decorous lowering of the British flag. Dressed in a suit, the prime minister of the new nation, Milton Obote, sat beside Prince Edward with an inscrutable smile on his face. A few hours north of the city, in Gulu, a group of Acholi tore the Union Jack to pieces and lit it on fire. These were two modes of relating to the decline of empire. One reflected the gradualism of postwar British policy, the other the radicalism of anticolonial resistance. The Ugandan poet and anthropologist Okot p'Bitek witnessed both. He was then a graduate student in social anthropology at Oxford University completing fieldwork in northern Uganda. “In Kampala the people were almost restrained in their rejoicing,” he writes to his advisers at the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology with a note of disappointment (Letter to E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Godfrey Lienhardt).Footnote 1 Conversely, the “excitement in Gulu” reflected his own excitement upon discovering that the Oxford theory of primitive religions might be a colonial projection. Just days later, the anthropologist Talal Asad wrote to the Institute from Khartoum describing the oral traditions he heard during his “excursions into Dar Kababish” (Letter to E. E. Evans-Pritchard [6 Oct. 1962]). It was while “moving about—on camel-back—in the extreme N. W. of Kurdistan” over the next two years, compiling recordings of poetry that he lost in the passage to England, that Asad conceived of the book that would initiate the postcolonial critique of religious and political theory in social anthropology (Asad, Letter to E. E. Evans-Pritchard [10 Jan. 1964]).Footnote 2
Asad the onetime poetry scholar and Okot the anthropologist-turned-poet were both sympathetic to the radicalism of an Acholi desecrating the flag, and yet both traveled between fields and nations—between poetry and anthropology, Britain and the decolonizing world. A key feature of their projects was the reworking of periodization in print. One of the meeting grounds of poetry and the anthropology of religion was the Oxford Library of African Literature book series, a programmatic initiative to sequester oral poetry in a native past. A series edited by Okot's and Asad's supervisors at the Institute of Social Anthropology, it was conceived as a way to preserve African oral poetry from the assault of modernity and to develop an African canon that might approximate, or explain, the fading British tradition. As the empire contracted, British academics like F. R. Leavis resorted to old England as an object of cultural analysis. This “anthropological turn,” as Jed Esty terms it, was motivated by a desire to shore up cultural integrity against imperial decline, and it was accompanied by a turn to Africa to explain the British past by way of the “primitive” present (163). At Oxford, religion was the adhesive that conjoined these pasts and presents, the totalizing term for the lost premodernity of Britain and the primitivism of contemporary Africa. But it was also a name for the generic coherence of poetry itself. What Johannes Fabian refers to as the “chronopolitics” of anthropology, in which “[t]he posited authenticity of a past (savage, tribal, peasant) serves to denounce an inauthentic present,” entombed African poetics beside the British canon (144, 11).
African oral poetry was thereby conscripted into late modernist theories of genre by means of a detour through social anthropology. And this detour left an indelible mark on decolonization-era poetry through the mediating work of scholar-poets like Okot and the Kenyan poet and theologian John Mbiti, whose aesthetics emerged in the transnational zone between Oxford and Kampala. A contributor to the Oxford Library whose studies of African religions are predicated on Oxford anthropological theory, Mbiti transvalued the temporal divisions of the series's editors for poetry. By contrast, Okot opposed social anthropology and its poetics with a materialist theory of religion. Stripped of its spirits, religion in his study of the Luo ethnic group had no mystical aura. It was simply “there” (Okot, “African Theism”). While this exploded appeals to a metaphysical premodernity, it also opened poetry to the “past” of religious culture. Song of Lawino (1966), his major contribution to postcolonial East African poetry, responded to the Oxford Library by changing the rules for anthologizing and textualizing the oral. Rejecting the postwar British politics of genre, it catalogs the oral corpus within modernity. Drawing on original archival research, in this essay I argue that far from being a romanticization of orality, as it is often received, Song of Lawino reconfigures the protocols for the textual production of poetry by revising accepted theories of time and matter in the anthropology of religion.Footnote 3 “Resisting and incorporating ethnographic norms,” the poem's interstates between literature and anthropology reframe histories of the departmentalization of African literature (Ramazani 175). The Nairobi literary revolution that led to the foundation of an African literature department is often regarded as a top-down imposition of Leavisian literary theory onto African contexts. But the eponymous woman speaker of Song of Lawino tells another story: a staunch critic of the Oxford Library's project, which was motivated by an approach to African culture similar to that of the Nairobi revolution in its early stages, Okot challenges the singular account of the construction of the African literature department in his poem. The manuscripts Okot deposited at the University of Nairobi capture the ambivalence of what Simon Gikandi and Apollo Amoko otherwise cast as the invention of an “African tradition” in England's image (Amoko 11). They instead reveal a constellation of institutions balancing conflicting aims with rising authoritarian pressure to conform to an abstract African “past.”
This story of the shadowy brokerage of literary and anthropological value and its reframing of the institutionalizing of African literature calls for an expanded view of the production of postcolonial literature. Recent studies of postcolonial literary institutions and print networks tend to notice the “contingencies of production,” in Olabode Ibironke's phrase, the “open, complex, and dialectical relations” joining authors to international literary institutions (5). But in spite of their emphasis on relationality, they are often restricted to the literary field.Footnote 4 Certainly, “[r]eading works as literature presupposes that there are already established, sedimented notions of what might count as literature,” as Stefan Helgesson avers (23). But what counts as literature hinges on the shifting evaluations of other fields. As the dialogue between Lawino and the anthropologist attests, the ever-fluctuating equilibrium between literary and other institutional frames does less to confirm sedimented notions of literary value than to further unsettle them. Song of Lawino's call to “[r]ead deeply and widely” acknowledges this interfield reality, and its destabilizing mode of interfield reading was finessed by a network of postcolonial academic poets attuned to literature's external commitments (146). If scholar-poets like Kamau Brathwaite, A. K. Ramanujan, and Okot were specialized historians, linguists, and anthropologists, they were far from naive when it came to the evaluative criteria of their fields. Wielding multiple competencies, their modes of reading and making in the literary borderlands illuminated what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “illusio” of field divisions (160). While remaining “faithful to the [literary] field,” like Bruno Latour's ethnographer they reveal its contingency by harnessing the “crossborder traffic” of the objects it circumscribes and evaluates (Latour 65, 30). Here religion became significant to each of them as it later did for Asad, not as a metaphysical category but as a trace of the institutional process of inventing modernity and of mystifying that invention.Footnote 5
The Oxford Library and Postcolonial Poetry
“[R]eligion,” Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, is “a measure of the distance between Nairobi and New York” (108). This distance is geographic, but it is also temporal, inasmuch as “modernity,” a spatiotemporal designation, is in part defined against modes of knowledge that exist in its past and that, in the case of religion, involve “commitment to disembodied agency” (113). While secular “modernity is a project,” as Asad explains, and so an “aim” or invention, it is often presented as a homogeneous movement from sacred to secular time, enchantment to disenchantment, religion to reality (Formations 13). Yet Appiah imagines a nonnormative modernity, deposed from its geotemporal seat and configured in “the world of the spirits” (135). Here he finds Akan religion's “accommodative style” exemplary for its pluralist ability to absorb knowledge irrespective of its ideological location (130). “[N]ondogmatic forms of cosmopolitanism and religion are not only compatible,” Susan Stanford Friedman adds, “but mutually reinforcing, in contrast to the conventional association of cosmopolitanism with secularism” (203). This dismissal of a normative modernity is built on objections initiated by Asad and Okot to the spatiotemporal lines of the mid-century anthropology of religion at Oxford. Students of E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Godfrey Lienhardt, Asad and Okot mark the transition from social anthropology to its postcolonial critique within and beyond poetry. Although Okot is often portrayed as a product of the Institute of Social Anthropology and did draw on its methodologies, his twice-rejected dissertation, later published as Religion of the Central Luo, was “a casualty of British anthropology's colonial encounter,” Tim Allen suggests (10). Although Asad's dissertation, The Kababish, reflects the spatiotemporal parameters of Oxbridge ethnographic theory—of modernity in Appiah's sense—by examining Kababish culture apart from empire, The Kababish Arabs is a self-critique of that method, taking the structures of imperial power at work in the Sudan as its primary subject.
These coeval interventions in social anthropology—both were published in the early 1970s—entailed poetics. At the time, the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology led the growing push to anthologize poetry from decolonizing Africa, and both Okot and Asad had been invited to contribute. While Asad's contribution was lost, the debate between Mbiti and Okot over the idea of the jok in the 1960s took place in these crosscurrents and exposes the way in which anthropological theories of African religions framed the printing and institutionalizing of postcolonial poetry. While this debate seemed to involve a technical theological question—whether jok should be translated as a single deity (“High God”) or a category (“spirits”)—it is predicated on the poets’ diverging responses to the institute's ambitious literary series, the Oxford Library of African Literature. Akamba Stories (1966), Mbiti's contribution, reflects the Oxford Library's intentions: its invention of a mystical, quasi-national literary past to consolidate political and literary power. By contrast, Okot published Song of Lawino, his first long poem, in lieu of a volume for the Oxford Library and critiquing its project. Doubly based in Oxford and Kampala as a graduate student from 1960 to 1970, he traded the abstraction of the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology for the applied anthropology of the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR). The anthropology of religion he developed there infused poetry tuned not to mystical nationalism but to the materiality and modernity of culture in print.
Although this disagreement between Okot and Mbiti concerned religious studies and anthropology in East Africa, I have suggested that its origins and effects centered on poetry. Indeed its parameters were drawn by F. R. Leavis's school of literary criticism at Cambridge University. The 1950s saw a significant migration of Leavis's students from the Faculty of English at Cambridge—and from its journal, Scrutiny—to the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology. Even the institute's chair, Evans-Pritchard, inquired after “this man Leavis who is like a brick wall” driving his own students away “like tennis balls into social anthropology” (qtd. in Hilliard 94). Peter Kalliney has recovered the importance of Leavis's literary “centre,” the term that Leavis used for Scrutiny's circle of cultural critics, to late colonial authors looking for an authorial space outside the racial logic of the commonwealth, as well as for a way to value their own minority traditions (75–115; Leavis 327). But in the case of anthropology, the appropriation of Leavisian criticism reiterated that racial logic. Many of the refugees to Oxford—Paul Baxter, Godfrey Lienhardt, Peter Lienhardt, David Pocock, and Malcolm Ruel—imported Leavis's literary paradigm into their anthropological theories, and with it the twin pillars of what Stefan Collini has called “[t]he nostalgic imagination” of mid-century British criticism: the “casual homogenization of ‘modernity’” as the movement from the sacred and integrated to the secular and alienated and the “perpetuation of an unanalysed binary opposition between ‘culture’ and ‘society,’” the academy and the people (23). Disagreements over the nature and extent of “Scrutiny's empire” mostly miss the significance of this great migration (Hilliard 217). Gikandi contends that Leavis's equation of “Englishness” with modernity shaped young African literature departments (“Globalization” 651), and Christopher Hilliard replies that “Leavis and his pupils were far less influential in the empire-commonwealth” than Gikandi suggests (246). This dispute neglects how mid-century Oxford anthropologists emerging from Leavis's Cambridge literary circle staked a claim on postcolonial African poetry, reading both “the poetry of earlier centuries” and poetry emerging from decolonizing Africa “in an archaeological or academic spirit” (Collini 22).
As founding editor of the Oxford Library, Godfrey Lienhardt returned the nostalgic imagination—routed through social anthropology—to literature, this time to the literature of African nations. Early in 1960, he wrote to Peter Sutcliffe at the Oxford University Press to pitch a series that would “place Africa . . . on the literary map” (Letter [23 Feb. 1960]). He had made transparent the way in which he believed Leavis's narrative of cultural decline applied to a modernizing Africa in a 1946 review for Scrutiny of an anthology of the structural anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski's posthumous writings. “The change taking place in African society to-day,” he writes, “is in many ways no more than an extreme example of the changes undergone by all small scale communities affected by the Industrial Revolution” (“Malinowski” 73). But the Oxford Library adapts this homogeneous rendering of modernization more programmatically to African oral poetry. In the same way that Leavis identifies literature as the bottle for the genie of culture, Lienhardt assures Sutcliffe that the “valuable indigenous work” that the series proposes to textualize and preserve synecdochizes “the cultural background of Africa [that] is being lost” (Letter [19 May 1961]). In order for that cultural background to remain intact, it must be not only preserved but invented. Like “the corpus of our literary tradition” in the “Loeb Classics,” Lienhardt writes, “this library will in fact establish what African literature is” (Letter [19 May 1961]).
In a Leavisian sense, Lienhardt's emphasis on preservation and his equation of African modernity with decline positions the critic as caretaker of a disappearing culture. Each proposed volume would preserve a bygone version of Africa just as his own early criticism defended the nostalgic vision of native Britain. Publications, Lienhardt writes in his “Notes for Contributors,” will contain “[a] full account of the cultural background to the texts” that “will involve partially recreating the physical and social environment from which a work draws its allusions and its meaning.” And, they will recapture the affect of the original (poem and culture): “a correct translation” will “show a feeling for the genius of the language and thought represented, and an imaginative approach to recreating it” (“Oxford Library”). Each volume, in other words, will represent a kind of autonomous cultural past that the critic recreates through a combination of description and imaginative translation. Modeling the series as a canonization of a tradition (Eliot) and a recovery of culture (Leavis) in this way gave its editors the power to invent premodern Africa, by way of literature, in their image.
One of the earliest contributors to the series was Mbiti, who was completing his doctorate at Cambridge in 1960 when he submitted the manuscript for what would become Akamba Stories. Daniele Nunziata frames Mbiti's experience of Lienhardt's editorship as a struggle against the British publishing industry's imperative to produce a “postcolonial exotic,” in Graham Huggan's sense (Nunziata 475). In fact, the importance of the volume lies less in its opposition to fetishism than in its imitative approach to the anthropology of religion and oral literature. What Nunziata would call the hegemony of the British editor is apparent in the way Mbiti absorbed the paradigm of the series. “I enjoyed reading your excellent study on the Nuer Religion this past year, and one would only wish that similar studies of a dozen or more African tribal religions could be made,” Mbiti writes to Evans-Pritchard in an early letter, thereafter implying that his dissertation on “New Testament Eschatology in comparison with Akamba beliefs” has benefitted from Evans-Pritchard's work. He repeats this in a later letter to Lienhardt, noting that his (Mbiti's) “lectures on African Traditional Religions and the New Testament” at Makerere make “use of your DIVINITY AND EXPERIENCE, as well as Professor Evans-Pritchard's NUER RELIGION, both of which I consider the best studies of African Religions.” The influence of Lienhardt and Evans-Pritchard on Mbiti's thinking about religion and aesthetics resounds in the volume's preface. Just as Lienhardt's Divinity and Experience assumes that for the Dinka “Powers” are predicated on a single “Divinity” (156), Mbiti suggests that “the Akamba believe that every object has its ‘force’ or ‘power,’” that “the entire universe is knit together by this invisible ‘force,’” and that “God,” whose “existence,” in Mbiti's account, “is taken for granted,” superintends that universe (Akamba Stories 17). And just as the hierarchical spiritual politics of the Dinka are reflected in their tribal politics for Lienhardt, for Mbiti the domain of God is “a complete copy” of earth, inhabited by the subsidiary spirits of ancestors, “the living-dead” (Akamba Stories 16, 15). These structural symmetries also surface in the stories themselves, which Mbiti argues invoke the “total environment” and accumulate “every created object” (23).
Through the intellectual mediation of academics like Mbiti, Leavisian anthropology traveled to East Africa. It informed Mbiti's formation of African religion into a coherent discipline during his tenure as a professor of religion and philosophy at Makerere University in Kampala. The distillation of this effort, African Religions and Philosophy (1969), is based on a course that was “the first of its kind in Makerere's curriculum,” as the historian Derek Peterson recalls, and that drew, as Mbiti acknowledged privately, on the anthropological theories of Lienhardt and Evans-Pritchard (Peterson). But Mbiti concealed this debt. “When I came to Makerere,” he claims, “there was no written material that one could use on African traditional religion,” which elides the fact that the “notion of [a] God” shared by “all the [African] religions,” his core thesis, derives from social anthropology (Mbiti and Mulei 13). Poetically, the Oxford Library also backlights Mbiti's critical and formal decisions. Echoing Leavis and Lienhardt, who look to poetry for a nostalgic vision of premodern integrity, Mbiti views oral techniques as antidotes to modernity's incoherence. The coordination of rhythm, image, “concentration of meaning,” and “the feeling which touches the innermost parts of one's being” in African prayers thus “interweave[s] the two realms” of the sacred and secular that have been severed by capitalism and empire (Mbiti, Prayers 21, 69). Mbiti's poetry simulates this effect through its formalist treatment of religious materials. Thus, his variation on an indigenous African prayer to the moon momentarily orders the moon's “rhythm of life,” which its supplicant aspires to recapture, in iambic pentameter in its third line:
The poem's quest to retrieve a “dying” way of “life” in form and theme reproduces the Oxford Library's nostalgic retrieval of an African oral past for the British present.
Materializing Divinity
If Mbiti metabolized Leavisian anthropology's “homogenization of modernity,” Okot dismantled the idea of modernity and with it the assumption that the materials of African poetries live in a past, one retrievable only by a political or academic elite. Okot's vocal disaffection for the Oxford literary critical and anthropological endeavor first arrived in the form of a letter to Lienhardt (his bachelor of letters adviser) and Evans-Pritchard, who had contacted him about contributing a volume for the Oxford Library. “It was most fascinating doing the Religious songs and chants,” he recalls of his fieldwork, “because through them, one had a glimpse, admittedly restricted, of the idea of JOK as the Acholi saw HIM: (or THEM!?).” Here the seemingly innocent distinction between “jok” as a singularity (“HIM”) and “jok” as a plurality (“THEM”) hints at the inadequacy of the notion of “Jok” as “Divinity” (Lienhardt's singularizing translation of the term) or “God” (Mbiti's). If those translations fail, so too do the political, poetic, and departmental symmetries they subtend.
Okot crystallizes this position in the 1963 article that would form the centerpiece of Religion of the Central Luo, the unaltered manuscript of his rejected Oxford dissertation. The prevailing assumption among anthropologists researching the Nilotes at the time was “that the generic term JOK could not mean something different from the particular joks with their peculiar names” and, by extension, that “Jok” conceived as the unitary embodiment of these instances represents “Supreme Being” or “High God.” But Okot instead stays on the plateau of the “particular” and “peculiar,” constructing a disaggregated theory of “the powers” by deconstructing ancestor worship (“Concept” 27). Whereas Evans-Pritchard and Lienhardt see lineage shrines as intercessory sites enabling the Nilotes to summon the “High God” through ancestral mediation, Okot argues that nothing lies beyond the ancestors. “[T]o the Central Luo the entities which they believed they encountered at the lineage shrine were not spirits,” Okot elaborates in Religion of the Central Luo, “but the ancestors as they were known before death” (104). D. A. Masolo explains this peculiar formulation of material existence after death by arguing that “[t]he Luo think of entities in physical or ‘quasi-physical’ terms, as occupying space from where they can be summoned or related to” (88). These entities embed themselves in the physical world by identifying themselves with totems during their lifetime. Indeed totems are not “emblems or representations of spirit” but accrue significance, Okot explains, “because a long time ago, an ancestor pronounced a curse on all those who would break a taboo concerning the totem” (Religion 92). Hence the Acholi landscape houses “lingering identities” who are not metaphysically separate but instead “part of the historical topography” (Masolo 91). Such lingering identities challenge social anthropology's temporal distinction between religion and modernity and its vertical distinction between divinity and humanity.
This materialist intervention is inflected by the democratic socialism of the British left, which Okot encountered as a student at the University of Bristol's Institute of Education, and which another institute in Uganda reinforced. Although he is remembered as a graduate of Oxford, Okot completed his fieldwork under the auspices of MISR. (He followed his radical hypothesis on the “jok” in his letter to Lienhardt and Evans-Pritchard with the note that “Professor [Aidan] Southall,” director of MISR, “is helping with supervision.”) The two institutes were political enemies. MISR differed with Oxford over how research might be applied, a difference that was bound to British domestic disagreements over class, race, and welfare. Oxford publicly opposed the “applied” partnership between anthropology and administration that colonial institutes like MISR represented. In a 1945 letter to Evans-Pritchard, Max Gluckman writes of the “grave danger that the demands of colonial governments for research workers may lead to an excessive concentration on practical problems, to the detriment of basic research” (qtd. in Mills 84). The same year, Lienhardt critiqued Malinowski in Scrutiny for confusing “an organic whole in which inter-related institutions organized human activities around a consistent system of values” with “moral problems” of “policy” (“Malinowski” 73).
In one sense, this discursive separation of research from practice obscures their early interdependence for both Oxford and MISR. The “ability to reformulate ‘social problems’ as scientific ones” (Mills 90), as David Mills and Benoît de L'Estoile each suggest, is in fact precisely what secured the postwar “autonomization of social anthropology” (L'Estoile 346). However, as MISR entered the 1960s, its growing interdisciplinarity threatened the autonomy of social anthropology and by extension its imperialist hierarchies. “None of these anthropologists,” the founding director of MISR, Audrey Richards, recalls of her first employees, “limited himself to the ethnographic studies then being produced by anthropologists, but recommended surveys of urban areas, economic studies of different kinds and research into local government systems, and on educational and legal problems” (175). Not restricted to “peoples whose cultures were ‘disappearing,’” as Lienhardt and Evans-Pritchard were, MISR began to focus on the “fascinating contrast in social structures” that urbanization and population growth were creating (Richards 183). Thus, Southall's first major book, Alur Society (1956), stresses the prominence of “[b]order zones of hybrid culture” incompatible with British tribal cartographies (10). MISR conferences reflected these amalgamative research agendas and featured speakers dissatisfied with “the tribal fields of attention of the social anthropologist,” as J. E. Goldthorpe described them in his plenary talk at a 1962 meeting that featured Okot's bachelor of letters research (2). Far more important in the period of nation formation, for Goldthorpe, were meta-anthropological studies like his own on the “elite” at Makerere University, the group of students that the colonial university, at the behest of the Asquith commission, had produced (3). Equipped with a hybrid approach to culture under Southall's mentorship, Okot ventured out of anthropology's “natural preserve” with his immanent theory of the jok, leaving its library behind as well (L'Estoile 343).
Thus, the particularism of Okot's arguments—on incomparability and the materiality of the jok—marks his jettisoning of Oxford nativism and with it the analogous literary and institutional projects of African academics like Mbiti. “The most definite and promising [prospective contributions] are Professor Evans-Pritchard's Zande Texts,” Lienhardt had written to Peter Sutcliffe in 1961, “and a volume of Acholi (Uganda) poetry by J. p'Bitek Okot, who is himself a poet in Acholi and is working with us here” (Letter [19 May 1961]). And in Evans-Pritchard's early handlist of reviewers, Okot's name is scrawled beside “Uganda Journal,” implying that in addition to contributing a volume, the poet would compose a positive review for the series. But the letter detailing Southall's supervision, Uganda's independence, and the plurality of the jok is notable for what it lacks: any mention of progress toward a publication (Okot, Letter to E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Godfrey Lienhardt). Okot never expressed the changing attitude toward the series that this silence implies. But his own voice lingers behind his friend David Rubadiri's, a poet who did write the Uganda Journal review that Evans-Pritchard solicited. “One gets the feeling wading through the volume that one is looking at a well glassed collection of butterflies,” at “living poems” chloroformed and pinned for the “scholar” (Rubadiri).
Editing Anthropology
As an anthology of oral poems from Okot's Oxford fieldwork, Song of Lawino is the lost Oxford Library volume. But now its architecture is porous, conflating premodernity and modernity and conspicuously printing the oral as matter for postcolonial modernism. When we approach it from the perspective of the series, the poem's repeated attempts to rethink the postcolonial archive become visible for what they were: transnational editorial interventions targeting temporal and anthological protocols and contesting social anthropology's claim on poetry. By contrast to the management of the native as past, Song of Lawino embeds the oral corpus within a modernity whose forms are multiple. In doing so the poem insists, against Lienhardt, Evans-Pritchard, and Mbiti, on indigeneity's nonmystical, material presence. Consider how the transcript of a ritual poem that concludes the consecration of an abila, the shrine of an ancestor, changes in the movement from Okot's Oxford bachelor of letters thesis to Song of Lawino. The original version is formatted as a call-and-response in paired lines of Acholi and English:
A standard format for an Oxford Library volume would have opposed Acholi to English, after the Loeb Classical Library book series, and it would have included an introduction describing poetry's participation in Luo society. Instead of reiterating this Leavisian distinction between nativity and modernity, Song of Lawino changes how oral poetry is textualized. The ritual chant is typographically distinguished from the containing poem, but it is also embedded in the poem's present:
Lawino confides in the present tense,
The poem responds to the “butterfly collection” of the Oxford Library—which encloses poems in a past accessible only to the critic-anthropologist—with a deliberate visualization of the religious past's contemporaneity. It thereby dissolves the Leavisian claim to interpretive priority, which rests on the difficulty thesis that the cultural past is the province of an educated elite. If the material surrounding these particular butterflies defends traditional medicine and indigenous religion, it by extension defends the right of Ugandan poetry to be a part of modernity's present vernacular.
In Song of Lawino's library scene, the poem walks us through the Oxford Library, contesting the international framing of the African library and counterpointing that framing to the materiality (the printedness) and modernity (the presence) of the poetries being anthologized in that library's imperial past:
It may at first seem that “print is figured as a danger to the media ecology of eastern Africa” here, as Nathan Suhr-Sytsma suggests (15). A revealing section of Religion of the Central Luo seems to reciprocate this thesis. It deals with what are called “free jok[s],” transnational spirits whose presence in Acholiland coincides with foreign invasions—Jok Ala marks the “disruptive influence of the Arabs,” and Jok Rumba is coeval with “European political, economic, and other activities” (Okot, Religion 116). These “foreign powers” possess victims without cause, and communication with them requires “foreign articles and languages” (116). “I cannot dance the rumba,” Lawino admits before advertising her proficiency at local styles of dance (Song of Lawino 31). Okot theorizes these powers materially: like ancestors, they have recognizable voices; they are identified with the world market; they metonymize international economic and political power. Racialized as “white” and therefore alien commodities (there is also a play here on the white face of a witch covered in ash), each book in Ocol's library is a free jok, an exogenous power. These renderings of the foreign appear to portray modern incursions into traditional life as unequivocal evils in much the same way that Lienhardt portrays decolonization as a threat to the cultural integrity of African oral poetry.
But what Lawino finds onerous is neither print nor the transnational as such: she objects to the total separation of the library from the influence of other traditions and locations: the (Oxford) library's influence is inimical because it is unilateral, like a ghost that “capture[s] your head” (Song of Lawino 204). As a version of the library scene in Okot's forgotten lyrical essay in the University of Bristol's student newspaper, Nonesuch News, the pathway through the “forest of books” conjures up another route, this one shaped by MISR's hybrid approach to anthropology. “I have walked up the gentle steps [of the University], and into the library,” Okot writes in Nonesuch, “and have watched students . . . communicating with the ‘absent’ members of the ‘family’—most of them long dead—a ghostly occupation” (“From Africa”). The students reading in the university library in this scene are juxtaposed to an author, who, like Lawino, wanders in from the outside. In both scenes, the speaker reconnects the library to a larger reality, a world more materially diverse, housing the abila and the institute, and transnational—spanning Bristol, Kampala, and Oxford—than anthropology's modernity allowed. Lawino does juxtapose orature—“Relevant and meaningful songs”—to a particular relation to print, but she still searches for a cosmopolitan editor, for “Someone who has genuinely / Read deeply and widely,” for someone like Okot, to change the logic of the library catalogue (Song of Lawino 122, 146).
As the director of the National Cultural Centre in Uganda for only a few months (from February to November of 1967), Okot launched his poetics as a national policy.Footnote 6 If Leavis's literary “centre” at Cambridge cradled culture in the university and for an elite minority, Okot imagined the center as “a Centre for experiment,” as he puts it in an interview in The People, open both to “the great experts in the countryside” and also to “[t]he educated few in the city” and the coterie of directors and intellectuals from Makerere University (“Face to Face” 6). Its programming reflected the cultural jumble of urban Kampala. English plays, Commonwealth poets, and international dance troupes appeared alongside village singers and Orak performers. Its National Theatre showcased American and Russian dancers, and its own dance troupe, “Heartbeat of Africa,” toured internationally (“Studio”). Okot traveled to Sweden and the United States on cultural diplomacy missions (“A Ugandan”; Letter to the editor [Uganda Argus]). At the center's Uhuru Festival, Rubadiri chaired “Poetry and Jazz” performances and readings featuring “Ugandans” with “other poets from other lands” (“Uhuru Festival”). When Okot was accused of fostering a “slave mentality” for accommodating the foreign and the indigenous, his anonymous reply slipped past the Scylla of monochrome nativism and the Charybdis of naive cosmopolitanism (“National Theatre Crazy” 8).Footnote 7 “The centre is not reactionary,” he explains, “it does not behave like certain old men who tend to despise anything new; nor does it react like some educated women who despise anything old and traditional” (16). The core issue, he proposed, was not “foreign influence” but rather the tightrope between imitation and invention, irrespective of whether the practitioner is “the village youth who is steeped in the popular traditional art forms” or “the Town youth who has taken to popular art forms” (16). Against the Ugandan president Milton Obote's growing call for unanimism and social anthropology's nativism, Okot built a space in which cultural options circulated synchronically within a heterogeneous modernity.
Yet Oxbridge and the ruling elite in East Africa mounted parallel attacks on this multivalent model of culture. From the outset, Lienhardt tacitly contested Okot's research. In a 1966 talk, he misrepresents Okot's theory of Acholi religion. Whereas he conceded there was “convincing evidence” that “among the Acholi, ‘Divinity High’ is less personified,” Okot's contention, as discussed above, was more radical: there is no “Divinity High” in Acholi religion (Lienhardt, “High Gods” 45). Building on this misrepresentation, Lienhardt argues that the strength of conceptions of a High God correlates to the sophistication of an East African culture's democratic structure. While all Nilotes are “extremely democratic,” the more democratic the group, the stronger its conception of “Divinity High” (44). Thus, because the Dinka, for instance, “have a large-scale political organization based upon a highly developed segmentary lineage system,” they also have “the most highly developed religion of a High God” (47). The argument exposes the political agonism sedimented in Lienhardt's and Okot's divergent theories of religion and poetry. The slippage from no “High God” to a “less personified” one allowed Lienhardt to understate the significance of the Acholi as well as the significance of democratic socialism in the British domestic context: here the more flexible a culture's institutions are (the more they resemble the New Left), the less “developed” it is, an inverse correlation that prioritizes the class politics of the British elite.
What Lienhardt might have called the “weak” democratic model of the center posed a similar threat to Obote. Disguising his consolidation of power beginning with the 1967 constitutional reforms that converted Uganda into a single-party state as a return to cultural tradition, Obote sought correspondingly singular representations of national culture from the center. In a speech at the Makerere Arts Festival, he minimized tribal distinctions in the arts and rejected foreign poetic diction (“daffodils” and “snow” [Obote 6]), referring to Ugandan literature mystically, as the “soul”—and servant—“of a nation” (5). That mystical symmetry between literature and the nation, like the symmetry between “Divinity” and “democracy” for Lienhardt, subordinated culture to the state: the same year that Obote delivered his speech, he charged Rajat Neogy, editor of Transition magazine, with sedition. If his efforts “emphasised the need to restore ‘traditional values’ at the centre of Ugandan social and political life,” as Richard Reid suggests, their centrism exorcised variant “interpretations of ‘traditional’ culture, custom and narrative” that Ugandan artists used to process political life (325, 44). In this milieu, the center's heterogeneity took the shape of the opposition. While Okot initially supported Obote's revised constitution in an open letter from Washington, DC, the following month he criticized Obote after MP Cuthbert Joseph Obwangor was “sacked” for dissenting from his party's constitutional reforms. “How far can a member speak his mind,” Okot asks in the Uganda Argus, “without being accused of being disloyal to the party and to the Government?” (Letter to the editor [The People]). The growing tension between Okot and Obote culminated in the center's exclusion from the 1967 independence-day celebrations, which Okot revealed in an interview unveiling his own plans for a competing festival. It was clear from the alternative festival's schedule, with its list of poets from “other lands” and inclusion of nonnative genres, that this was to be an antiauthoritarian celebration. A special independence-day issue of The People captured the resultant face-off between Obote, whose photograph appears first among a series of notable Ugandan politicians, and Okot, leader among cultural actors (“Leaders”). Ultimately, Okot's protest on behalf of Obwangor proved prescient: on 3 November 1967, less than six months after his appointment, the Uganda Argus published the headline “National Theatre Chief Sacked.”Footnote 8
The Ambivalent Revolution
Lawino's oblique journey through a library compiled by social anthropology poses an alternative to the usual narrative of colonial education's influence on the departmentalization of African literature. When Okot landed in Nairobi in 1967, he had completed both a long poem in English and an anthropological study of Acholi religion. Both projects collaboratively dismantled the Leavisian assumptions shaping anthropology's printing of African poetry by contesting their temporal and sociogeographic stratification. Thereafter Okot assumed a primary post in anthropology at the Institute of African Studies as well a guest lectureship in oral literature in the University of Nairobi's English department, where he participated in the replacement of the English department with a department of African literature. Recalling Gikandi's claim that the Cambridge school contoured postcolonial African literary production, Amoko contends that “On the Abolition of the English Department,” the manifesto that propelled this foundational restructuring of literary education in Africa, “reproduces with an African face the language of Leavis” by way of “the fundamental nexus it posits between ethnos and the institutions of high culture” (9).Footnote 9 Yet if Okot “dominated the early stages of the [Nairobi] revolution,” as Carol Sicherman attests, his prior rejection of social anthropology's similar attempts to invent an “African tradition” demands a more nuanced account of the revolution's institutional formation (134). As the manuscripts that Okot deposited in the University of Nairobi library disclose, the departmental fabric of African literature cannot be disintricated from the political pressure to promote an abstract “tradition” in a period of increased government surveillance and authoritarian violence. Labeling the effort to construct an African tradition as a transference of British “ethnocentrism” without this qualification threatens to efface the subtler responses to these pressures performed by exilic authors like Okot (Amoko 9).
The abolition of the English department coincided with Mbiti's visit to Nairobi to promote African Religions and Philosophy. And in public forums at the Goethe Institute and the University of Nairobi, Okot voiced concern about the shared disciplinary biases of both of these attempts to recuperate and institutionalize knowledge of the “African.” In a talk that critiques the head of the department of African literature, Andrew Gurr, he objects to the hierarchical assumptions behind the educational aim to produce literary specialists, which the Nairobi revolution had failed to redress. If the colonial school produced a “‘gentleman’ qualified to enter the colonial ruling class” for whom the mark of civilization is “to understand his traditions and to criticise them,” then, as Okot contends, “[t]he leaders of the literary revolution in East Africa hold the same views” (“Crisis” 126). Only, “for them, it is the African traditions that civilised man in Africa should seek to understand and criticise” (126). Juxtaposed to this implicitly Leavisian edifice built for a rarefied literary elite, he upholds institutes like MISR and the Institute of African Studies, where “literature” would not be handled as “the preserve of a few students,” nor as “a separate and isolated ‘subject’ to be ‘studied’ by a few” (129, 130). A lecture that same year to the nascent University of Nairobi religion and philosophy department pivoted to the religion curriculum, which ought not, Okot urges, foist theism on African religions. While this critique spotlights African academics like Mbiti, it implicates their British antecedents by way of Mbiti's publisher, Oxford University Press, which Okot metonymizes as the maker of “big beautiful books” in editions of “blue and gold”—the colors on the binding of Mbiti's Oxford Library edition—that perpetuate falsehoods about Africa (“African Theism”).
Despite these rejoinders to the early departmental conception of African studies in literature and religion, Okot's later writing seems to walk in the opposite direction. In its final form, African Religions in Western Scholarship (1971)—his ambitious genealogy of Christianity and its influence on interpretations of African religions—equivocates in response to “On the Abolition of the English Department” and African Religions and Philosophy. It sponsors an abstract nationalism but at the same time advocates for a materialism critical of abstraction. Hence its typescript “is dedicated to,” among others, “Obote,” the Ugandan president responsible for Okot's exile—“for initiating political and social revolutions in the interest of the common man”—an interest that Okot was exiled for thinking Obote lacked (Full typescript). (Only an accident of history, not a shift in commitment, kept this from the published book—Idi Amin seized control of Uganda just before African Religions was printed.) And the ensuing argument mirrors the abstraction of social anthropology's editing of the African canon. Even as it calls for “detailed and objective studies,” “concrete evidence,” and the representation of “the institutions of African peoples as they really are,” it claims that “to Africans this is the only world,” a generalization based on evidence from one small region of northern Uganda (African Religions 57, 79, 7, 110). Thus, early critics decried the work for reproducing the problem it addresses: on the basis of a case study, it caricatures a continent (Ogot, “Intellectual Smugglers”; Mbiti and Mulei; Mazrui; Rigby).Footnote 10 It creates a mystical Africa to rival those of Mbiti, Lienhardt, and Evans-Pritchard while critiquing mysticism.
But this was not the way African Religions was conceived. Its sequence of drafts reveals a different structure beneath its published structure. In its earliest form, which was intended (as its pagination indicates) to conclude Okot's Oxford dissertation, it does juxtapose “western scholarship” with a single religious culture, “the Central Luo” (“Is Jok God?” 261).Footnote 11 Counterpointing a genealogy of the origins and travels of Western thought, from Judeo-Christian theology and Greek philosophy through early missionary encounters and Max Müller's theory of primitive religion, it poses an elegantly simple question: “Is Jok God?” The answer it derives differs from the foregoing material in its specificity. Backlit by the intellectual history of the West is a geographically circumscribed assertion: “[t]o the Nilotes, Jok was not God” but “a class-word” (“Is Jok God?” 261). This is not the generalization about all African thought systems that it would become. It is instead entirely consistent with Song of Lawino's rejection of the Oxford Library's homogeneous opposition between secular modernity and the religious past. An early thesis statement indicates that African Religions, like the chapter that galvanized it, reciprocated this view. Its “dual aim,” the thesis proposes, is “to explore and expose the diverse theories of African religions and beliefs in western scholarship” and “to present the religion of an African people—the Central Luo of Uganda, as they themselves see it” (Okot, “Anthropological Studies”). Subsequent theses substituted this whole-to-part trajectory for a general one: the critics, therefore, were right.
Similarly, Song of Prisoner (1971), the long poem written contemporaneously with African Religions, suffered from decontextualization as it approached publication. Against Okot's occasional equivocal suggestion that the speaker has “many voices” (Lindfors 98), the poem was entitled “Song of Philip Ochieng” in an early draft. A local journalist active in publicizing literary and religious controversies and in editing Okot's own poetry, Ochieng was known for his controversial columns in the Sunday Nation. Arguing for the likeness of poem to column—its long free verse stanzas that one editor critiques as “essay like” visually imitate Ochieng's opinions—the title locates Song of Prisoner in modern Nairobi (“This stupid bitch”). One revision protests discrimination in urban parks:
Another expresses Ochieng's fear that in his absence his children are prey to
These problems—urban vagrancy and the intrusion of premodern belief within the modern legal system judging the imprisoned speaker—were ubiquitous subjects in newspapers. In the same way that Okot anchors “Song of Philip Ochieng” in Nairobi, he addresses a specific “sword / of Justice.” An alternate copy of the second manuscript was returned to him with a cover letter from the Kisumu magistrate's office, entitled “DE PROFUNDIS” and signed “JD.” Though the reader's identity is lost, the letterhead suggests that the draft was sent to an actual magistrate, which may explain why in a subsequent draft, but not in the published version, the prisoner deposes “You magistrate / Wielding the sword / Of Justice” (Okot, “2. A Hippo's Thigh” 7). While its early form reflects Song of Lawino's insistence on printing (and thus materializing) the “tribal” past in the poetic present, the departicularizing of the poem has produced the same confusion nagging readers of African Religions. E. S. Atieno-Odhiambo groups Okot, in an early review of Song of Prisoner, with “self-styled left-wing intellectuals in Kenya today” who trade “clear” social solutions that might “guide the amorphous sentiments of the masses into a programme of action” for “exhibitionism” (63).
What might explain these parallel acts of decontextualization? Was Okot stepping back from his protest of the abstractions funneled through mid-century British institutions? Between impulse and execution, dissent and dedication, were the experience of exile, the entrenchment of authoritarian power in East Africa, and the double rejection of a dissertation. At Oxford, Lienhardt resisted Okot's central intervention, which would have discounted his own political and religious theory of Luo culture. In Nairobi, there was little security for those who demurred from Jomo Kenyatta's policies. After the assassination of Okot's friend Tom Mboya, Kenyatta assumed control over the publications of the Institute of African Studies, where Okot taught, and suppressed student protests (Ogot, My Footprints 209–37). A reader wrote “kill” over Kenyatta's face in blue ink in a copy of East African Standard at the University of Nairobi (“Above”), Okot pleaded against the tyranny of “Mount Elgon Kerenyaga” (the Swahili term for “Kenya,” both a national symbol and a metonym for Kenyatta, who published his dissertation as Facing Mount Kenya) in a version of Song of Prisoner (“Song of Prisoner” 3), and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o left the literature department.Footnote 12 On the manila folder enclosing Song of Prisoner's manuscript, Okot drew crosshairs. His name is in the middle (Folder).
Unpublished at Heinemann
As a barometer for the battle over modernity between postcolonial poetry and anthropology, the contradictions central to African Religions and Song of Prisoner distill the dialogue between Oxford and Lawino. They also expose the limits of streamlining—after Lienhardt, Mbiti, and Evans-Pritchard—the multivalent institutional trajectories of postcolonial poetry. Refracted through versatile authors like Mbiti and Okot, who traversed multiple fields, narratives of the institutionalization of African literature and religion need to account for the contradictory political pressures and disciplinary allegiances that shape literature from far afield. Over the past two decades, readers of Okot have turned to his oeuvre for a postcolonial commentary on such intersections. An anthropologist with a “split vision” of Africanity (Ramazani 175), a multilingual poet obligated to different “circuits of value” in English and Acholi (Garuba and Okot 315), and a lawyer who envisioned the practice of modern law alongside traditional justice (Leman 78–110), Okot is an author whose corpus is in many ways about the multivalence of poetry's attachments. The archival record connecting the Oxford Library to Song of Lawino and triangulating Mbiti and Okot with the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology illuminates how postcolonial poets negotiated these attachments both conceptually, as many of the above studies attest, and institutionally, as my own account details. Anticipating Asad's (Formations) and Appiah's deconstruction of the opposition between religion and modernity, poets like Okot recognized the imperial operations at work behind the temporalizing of poetry in print and the artificiality of mystical divisions between academic fields. “Africanists have long . . . internalized the breakdown of dichotomies with which (post)secular theorists now struggle,” as Jeanne-Marie Jackson and Suhr-Sytsma note, recognizing “that the secular is and has always been fragile, coexisting with myriad other social and epistemological possibilities” (xi, x). The consciousness of such fragility emerged through the interfield projects of postcolonial poets like Okot, whose own institutional journey intersected with Asad's.
Recovering this alternative history requires reading widely, to recall Lawino, assembling postcolonial texts like the unpublished anthology that Taban Lo Liyong pitched to Heinemann in 1970. It was an anthology he hoped would capture the “syntheses of all sorts” that had taken place in 1960s East African writing, providing a “storehouse” of oral and traditional literature, poetry, biography, literary criticism, and writing on culture and development. Had it been completed, it would have enabled readers to navigate an intricate nest of postcolonial religious, political, cultural, and poetic discourses. Yet Heinemann's Nairobi representative, David Hill, was averse to the extraliterary nature of such projects. “I wish,” he wrote, “Taban and Okot would stick to literature!” And Henry Chakava called the anthology in its entirety “[a] hopeless ambition,” especially “the culture and development sections.” Those sections would have helped portray the emerging postcolonial literary field in the way that I have done. Of course Taban ceded the section, in the same way that he abandoned his position at the Institute of African Studies and his “local” interest in native cultures for a position in the literature department at the University of Nairobi. Because of editorial decisions like these, the dynamics that I have traced between the Oxford Library of African Literature and Song of Lawino and between the University of Nairobi Department of Literature and African Religions in Western Scholarship tend to remain at the periphery of postcolonial studies. Okot's similar interfacing of poetry and its others in print was published, and it exemplifies the expansive readerly methods that cultivate revisionary narratives of postcolonial literary institutions. If we follow the material pathways behind a poem's construction, we may, Song of Lawino shows us, end up in a library in Bristol, a magistrate's office in Kisumu, or a spirit possession ceremony in Gulu.
