But Okot was refreshingly different. No European echoes could be heard in the background. His
Song of Lawino was the first long poem in English to achieve a totally African identity.
This was no accident, considering Okot's education, cultural interests, and literary inclinations. He was born in 1931 in Gulu, Uganda, to a school teacher and his wife. After attending schools in Uganda, earning a Certificate of Education at Bristol University in England, and studying law at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth, Okot went on to Oxford, where he studied for his B.Litt, at the Institute of Social Anthropology. It was here that he wrote a thesis on Acoli and Lango traditional songs, a formal academic study that must have forced him to take a closer look at the structure, content, and style of songs he had heard and sung as a young man growing up in Uganda. This project, completed three years before the publication of Song of Lawino , may have suggested to him a new way of singing in English.
Okot appears to have developed an interest in music, song, literature, and traditional culture while very young and to have sustained this interest throughout his life. As a schoolboy at King's College in Budo, Uganda, he composed and produced an opera, and in 1953, when only twenty-two years old, he published his first literary work, Lak Tar Miyo Kinyero Wi Lobo (Are Your Teeth White? Then Laugh), a novel in Acoli that was translated as White Teeth in 1989.
This is a free page. This page contains 200 words. This
biography contains 6,425 words (approx. 21 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Okot p'Bitek Access Pass.
