Reading Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino in the Era of Postcolonial Technoscience

Abstract

This paper interrogates the branding, in Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino, of such practices as female beautification styles as inappropriate for Africans, especially in today’s age of globalism where certain aspects of Western culture have pervaded nearly the entire world. It also probes the ideas of language, education, and religion as they are presented by both Lawino and Ocol in the poem. In undertaking this task, the postulations of both Warwick Anderson and Geoffrey Bowker on technoscience are employed in order to place this discussion within current postcolonial realities. Additionally, the paper utilizes the arguments of several postcolonial theorists on culture and change. Specifically, this paper employs Bill Ashcroft’s stance on the use of resistance in postcolonial theory, Michael Chapman’s conception on the impurity of culture, Frantz Fanon’s postulations on “blackness,” and Amilcar Cabral’s understanding of culture. In its evaluation of Song of Lawino, the treatise posits that postcolonial theory must itself keep shifting, and that some of its most cherished perspectives may be disputed today. It concludes that Lawino demonstrates grievous inflexibility, while Ocol reveals disastrous sycophancy. Thus, both of them will find themselves as aliens in this era, because it is impossible for Ocol to be the White man he wants to be, and it is, similarly, impossible for Lawino to strictly follow the traditional culture that she extols.