How ‘Lawino’ crippled our art, ideology

There has been an intense debate in literary spaces pitting a younger generation of writers first given voice by Kwani?, the literary journal founded by Binyavanga Wainaina, against an older generation of literary scholars who came of age intellectually under the shadow of the famous African writers’ conference at Uganda’s Makerere University in 1962.

The debate is about what constitutes African literature and who is an African writer.

Two ideas emerging from the Makerere and other conferences have come to dominate African literary expression: (1) African literature and the African writer capture the African world view, which can be thought of as the sum total of the socio-political ideas and practices of African traditional society; (2) African literature is functional, aiding the African struggle, and the African writer is part of that struggle.

According to what can be conveniently termed the Makerere formula, Okot P’Bitek’s Song of Lawino exemplifies the essential attributes of African literature, and by the same token, P’Bitek qualifies as an African writer.

The character of Lawino validates the philosophy and customs of the traditional Acholi society. She suggests that traditional African values and practices form an essential part of being African.

But the book also exemplifies the limitations placed on literature and the writer by the Makerere literary tradition. Lawino, and by extension those who believe in her cause, is unaware of self-caricature, even as she fights the caricature of herself and Acholi culture.

Without a moment of reflection, she sings approvingly of customs that denigrate her as a woman.

She celebrates simple ideas and harmful practices as intellectual and cultural achievements, and naively critics modern ideas. In the process, she becomes a creature of pity and ridicule.

Lawino appraises the world through a frame of mind that Abiloa Irele, in his essay, In Praise of Alienation, described as “mytho-poetic.” As a result, she accepts her situation as the best of all possible outcomes, and is incapable of re-imagining her condition differently.

DOMINATED LITERARY EXPRESSION

This Makerere conception of literature has dominated literary expression, with its proponents often acting as the literary equivalent of the morality police.

Writing dealing with individual angst or love was found guilty of being uncommitted or of escapist neo-colonial stargazing. Stories in which the characters assumed a modern culture and the heroes did not, as it were, “romance the hut” or those that did not feature old men dispensing wisdom were condemned as un-African.

So similarly, people writing in Kwani? are often dismissed as not writing “real,” or alternatively “African,” literature. And when they write about the horrors of civil war, tribalism and corruption without employing the simplistic and didactic Makerere formula, they are seen as pandering to Western stereotypes of Africa.

The poetry of Sedar Senghor is a powerful argument against the Makerere literary model. Even though his poems are shot through with “negritude,” they rise above it and retain their artistry.

For example, as P’Bitek bemoans the denigration of Acholi culture in dry, literal phrases that are devoid of mood, Senghor’s poetry takes us on a subtle, sensual journey.

We listen with Senghor to the oars “dripping with falling stars,” and we experience the guilt-tinged pleasure as he sits anxiously “in the shadows of our secret.” Senghor’s poetry is transcendent, Okot’s is pedestrian.

Senghor’s communication of political and cultural messages is subtle, the messages dreamlike, for he is concerned with achieving his artistic purpose. P’Bitek only uses the resources of art superficially.

The net result then is that even if you were antipathetic towards negritude, Senghor’s poems would still be spiritually uplifting and intellectually stimulating, ultimately cathartic.

In the case of P’Bitek, if you had no anthropological interest in Acholi culture, the poem is dead to the heart and intellect.

While the aesthetics of Song of Lawino are a matter confined to literary discourse, not so the ideology the book propagates, for cultural nationalism in all its guises — including negritude, African personality, and African Socialism — has had a bearing on Africa’s development.

The claim of cultural nationalism, as Abiola Irele puts it, is that it was only within our traditional culture that we were “most at ease with ourselves, that there was the truest coincidence between us and the world.”

As such, its proponents argued, Africa’s social, political and economic development had to be based on the values and practices of its pre-colonial society. The democratic idea was criticised as being in conflict with Africa’s culture of rule by elders, while the concept of individual freedoms was said to undermine African communalism.

Africa’s attempt to construct a unique development model based on pre-colonial society as advocated by cultural nationalism has cost us dearly in terms of wars, underdevelopment and tyranny.

The acceptance of liberal democracy as the organising principle of modern society is an unequivocal repudiation of cultural nationalism.

So what are we to make of the reputation of Song of Lawino as an African literary and polemical classic? As we have seen, its art is woefully overshadowed by its “utility.”

And the cultural nationalism it promotes at the expense of its artistic purpose not only caricatures Africa but, more seriously, has been responsible for our state of underdevelopment. Song of Lawino has failed as art and as ideology.

This article first appeared in the The East African.