Song for Okot and Ngugi

A tribute by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, in mourning Chinua Achebe, was printed in The Guardian newspaper of May 26, published from Lagos, Nigeria. It included the following statement: “Achebe bestrides generations and geographies. Every country in the continent claims him as their author. Some sayings in his novels are quoted frequently as proverbs that contain a universal wisdom”.

Ngugi may have downplayed his own presence across Africa. His novel Weep Not Child, as the first in Heinemann’s African Writers Series, has also been marketed and widely read in schools reached by Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

It is Okot p’Bitek’s works, which suffered from that severe blow that was dealt literary publishing by the collapse of East African Publishing House, easily the pioneering hero of private publishing of writers from East Africa under the creative energies of John Nottingham.

The movement by Okot p’Bitek to a teaching job at the University of Ife in Nigeria in the 1970s, coincided with the fall of EAPH. Okot’s celebrity status among the university’s students did not benefit sales of Song of Lawino and his other works.

A section of the university is named after him; and there are plans to dramatise Lawino’s acerbic tongue in November 2013. Rampant violations of copyrights, which has severely crippled publishing in Nigeria, kept away Henry Chakava’s versions of Okot’s works from Nigeria’s huge market.

This commentary celebrates two literary classics from East Africa’s recent history. Ngugi’s Wizard of the Crow and Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino are clearly destined to share many of history’s tribal marks.

Each was translated by the authors themselves from original versions written in Kikuyu and Acholi languages, respectively. While Ngugi was a university-trained scholar of literature available in the English language, Okot p’Bitek taught mathematics and later earned degrees in law and anthropology.

He earned a doctoral degree in anthropology from Oxford University, the citadel of the use of the discipline as a colonial tool for disrupting and administering conquered peoples.

Their high intellectual training resonates in these two works; yielding concrete evidence of the region’s fertility in fermenting world standard literary classics.

Their lending dignity to their people’s languages affirms Professor Cheik Anta Diop’s translation into Wolof language in Senegal of Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity; and visionary calls for writers across Africa to enrich and give renaissance to their people’s linguistic and literary ancestries. The militancy and arrogance in their works is clear.

Both writers use a woman to rent out messages they carry in their minds and wombs “resistance to tyranny” by rulers and local sycophants. As Lindsey Barret has put it in a review (published in 2010 issue of Kilimanjaro magazine), they assert: “The belief that the human spirit can be transformed into a superhuman... force when confronted with tyranny.”

Ngugi’s Nyawira and Okot’s Lawino represent spirit of hope, of being authentic to oneself; not bowing to overbearing rulers, and the power of true love.

In the Wizard of the Crow, Ngugi combines skills learned from a vast record of world literature in print; integration of local traditions of oral story-telling, and a deep embrace of Marxist theories of history and development.

His satire on and contempt for ignorant and murderous rulers who fanaticise about themselves as movers of history, is a reflection of Marxian respect for the role played in history by “forces” used by man to produce economic goods, and relationships between men in those moments of production.

He, however, does not abandon personal responsibility and power of the human spirit. While mocking sycophants who enlarge their ears so that they can better serve “The Ruler” by hearing all the treasonous gossip going on in his domain; or elongate their tongues so that they can splash nauseating lies, praises and clichés about “The Ruler,” he is still emphasising their individual responsibility for supporting dictators and their destruction of society.

Ngugi’s passion for detail, his latent wrath and accuracy in bringing out how trust by wananchi (plain citizens) by those in power, is at par with V.S. Naipaul.

For Okot’s Song of Lawino, detail is the building block for his anthropological safari. He affirms architectural details, household items in an Acholi home, ugly features of a cultural traitor — the catechist — with spittle flying out of his mouth as he mouths chants of an alien religion that is corrosive to the sexual powers in young girls ready for historical duties of procreation: “Saliva squirted from his mouth, and froth flew like white ants from his mouth, the smelly drops landed on our faces... the milk in our ripe breasts boiled...”

His depiction of diverse tribes of human dung on the floor of a toilet attached to a nightclub is used as a bitter analogy for the despicable quality of failed leaders wielding power in post-colonial African countries.

The power of the spoken word as a spear for killing the false ideology in her husband Ocol’s head is fierce.

She reduces him to a lunatic sub-human level: “He begins to behave like a man hyena. Ocol’s eyes resemble those of the Nile perch.”

He is a despicable scavenger living on ideas, political ideologies and practices of alien peoples who do not know the power in African communalism and sharing of bounties of social existence.

Using an Acholi tradition of insult and the constitutional provision that: “when a man feels that he has suffered an injury there is no authority to whom he can make a complaint and from whom he can obtain redress, so he at once challenges the man who has wronged him to a duel and the challenge must be accepted,” Lawino lashes out brutally.

Okot p’Bitek returns to combative love in a woman; human dignity of the African; his responsibility as an authentic contributor to making human history; thereby ending alienation inflicted on him by other people’s evil governance.

These two works serve universal values, while their “prodigious feats of both linguistic dexterity and imaginative fertility” bring great literary honour to Africa. One thing the two giants make plain is that great writing is not by the lightly read and self-educated.

The youth of Africa have in them two Kilimanjaros to climb and write from their mountain tops.