(Re)membering Uganda’s Lost Novels

But there were great East African novels before Ngugi. In this article, I want to remind us of two Ugandan novels that were written and published before independence: Okot p’Bitek’s White Teeth and Akiiki Nyabongo’s Africa Answers Back. I call them ‘Lost Novels’ not because I have an appetite for the hyperbole but to evoke a sense of embarrassment in African literary commentators for this shameful collective amnesia. How too easily we forget or even ignore the treasure that sits just below our very noses. Okot’s White Teeth was first published in 1953 in Acholi as Lak Tar, five years before Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, (which is erroneously acclaimed as the ‘firstborn’ of the African novel). Nyabongo’s Africa Answers Back was produced even earlier in 1936.

These two works of fiction depict the African experience in colonial Uganda and give us a sense of the social landscape of the times. These pioneering novelists reconstruct Uganda’s history by undermining the official colonial meta-narratives that came to define our cultural, economic and political experience under colonial rule. Using subversion and quasi-negritude benchmarks, these novelists de-center the Eurocentric tradition of fictional aesthetics and elude the legacy of the ‘civilizing’ mission that the colonial project claimed as its ambition. Both Okot and Nyabongo use the traditional African lenses to explore the social, economic and political terrain of Uganda then.

Akiiki Nyabongo’s Africa Answers Back evokes the nostalgia of pre-colonial social order by underlining the harm that colonial hegemony put on Africa’s socio-cultural fabric. In recasting the religious wars that happened at the end of the 19^th century, the novel points out the turmoil and disruption that the European occupation of Africa had on its capacity for social cohesion and cultural growth. This novel is an effort at asserting the voice of the native Ugandan by telling their own story (by themselves). The title says it all. Much like Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Africa Answers Back is a novelistic response to Europe’s depiction of Africa as inherently barbaric and in dire need of civilization. In reading Nyabongo’s novel, I was reminded of W.E.B Du Bois’ book The World and Africa. In The World and Africa, Du Bois takes a historical perspective to highlight Africa’s contribution to the development of the modern world: through slavery and colonial occupation. If Du Bois’ book highlights the fact that Africa positively impacted the West, Nyabongo’s underscores the idea that the West jammed Africa, in the same measure as Walter Rodney argues in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

I am convinced that Nyabongo’s novel is grossly under-read yet it is clear that both its historical and thematic power should rightly define its moment. As to why it would be so unknown to so many unlike Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which was produced a dozen years later, is a fact we can attribute to the colonial control and censorship of the time. We must remember that in the mid-1930s, colonialism was at its peak, extremely paranoid of any form of opposition or challenge. Achebe and Ngugi were lucky partly because their novels came out when the world, and Britain itself, was in the mood to end colonialism, rather than sustain or strengthen it as was the case in the 1930s. If the empire was at the height of its strength in the 1930s, the late 1950s and early 1960s marked the depth of its decline and collapse. Therefore the side-lining of Nyabongo’s novel was not on account of its lack of literary quality or thematic energy but because of the political mood of the time. In a word, Nyabongo wrote at an unfortunate time. We need to seize the initiative and liberate this book from the darkness of the dump corner in which the system hid it.

Almost a similar mapping can be made of Okot’s Lak Tar / White Teeth. Okot p’Bitek’s White Teeth is located in the colonial atmosphere. It can be read as the source of Okot’s commitment to quotidian narratives. Like in the famous songs he wrote later, Okot’s literary expression in White Teeth is anchored in a deeply Afrocentric aesthetic tradition. His consciousness is rightly tuned, almost effortlessly, to the linguistic and figurative fabric that can be conceived as ‘genuinely’ African. At a time when most of the African elite were hopelessly Westernized, Okot’s mode of reasoning and literary craft showed in White Teeth a deeply Africanized terrain of contemplation and style of expression. In his basic idiom of thought and intellectual thrust, Okot has an impressively Africanized mind. No wonder, therefore that he spends the first page on the narrator reciting his mwoc, a praise poem that also constitutes the protocol of introduction. One’s mwoc gestures one’s identity and individuality. Most amazing is that Okot published this at the young age of 22. By any standards, Okot could pass for a child protégée – a sort of Fresh Kid talent of the 1950s. Someone whose craft comes to them with the utmost ease.

Okot uses Acholi as his primary medium of expression to produce White Teeth – Lak Tar. By this revolutionary gesture, Okot triggered the birth of the all-important question of language in African literature. The language debate came to a hit in the 1962 conference of African writers of English expression at Makerere University, Kampala. One of the most explosive missives that followed the conference was Obi Wale’s article “The Dead End of African Literature”. Obi Wale argued that only literature written in a native African language is worth being branded African. To Wale, literature in English or French was not African literature. If Obi Wale’s definition (or the sensation it appeals to) is anything to go by, then Okot p’Bitek passed the test before it was set, when he wrote Lak Tar. Even Ngugi’s leadership of the language crusade in the 1970s and 1980s was inherited from Okot p’Bitek symbolic foundation. Although many Sub-Saharan African writers have had to write in English, French or Portuguese, the quest for literature originally written in indigenous languages is still alive today.

Even after auto-translating the work, the English version still sounds familiarly African. To use Gabriel Okara’s phrase, the language of White Teeth is “English words, African speech”. Okot’s courage and success in exploring the linguistic experiment are felt more in Wer pa Lawino / Song of Lawino. Using the same formula (Acholi first and English last), Song of Lawino has positioned itself as one of the greatest wonders in the world of African literature. It amply illustrates Africa’s authentic idiom of thought. But Song of Lawino finds its roots in White Teeth / Lak Tar. White Teeth is the most original, if not the foundation, of Okot’s literary idiosyncrasies. For instance; the cynical, sarcastic jokey and humorous texture of Okot’s style is very visible right from the start. The novel’s rhythm flows with a poetic beat. It can be described as poetic prose. Okot’s natural instinct for orality and song-like expression is interwoven in the narrative.

In the detail of its content, White Teeth handles cardinal elements of the colonial socio-cultural life. Okeca Ladwong, the protagonist, is a character that crisscrosses multiple spaces of social existence. He is a village boy from Acholi-land who ventures into the unknown territory of urban metropolitan Uganda. Ladwong’s social position is not rooted in a stable unmovable locus. He is capable of accessing the extreme ends of the key epistemological binaries: margin and center, traditional and modern, rural and urban, parochial and metropolitan. Like other Africans at the time, Ladwong stands between these binary oppositions by the end of his Kampala city adventure. While he begins with child-like innocence and purity of identity in his home village, Ajulu, his experience in metropolitan Kampala puts him at tangled cross-roads of culture.

The initial cultural friction upsets his peace and places him squarely at the periphery of the new world. Even his interaction with Kampala’s landscape and the material environment is a jittery experience. When he tries to cross the road, he is frightened by the speeding automobiles: “Each time I made to cross the street, vehicles came towards me with an intention to kill.” He is completely alienated by the pattern of life in the city. Whenever he tries to apply his tested skills of Acholi survival craft and valor, it backfires with serious ramifications. When the crowd and police surround him after he accidentally knocks an Indian down, he challenges them to a duel drawing his knife and professing his mwoc. All he reaps from this stunt is jail time and a trial in a court of law.

White Teeth implicitly portrays the colonial condition of feeling ‘un-homed’. To be un-homed is to not feel at home within your own home because you are not at home within yourself. Unhomeliness causes a psychological refugee to mix their two cultures. Ladwong’s cultural identity crisis makes him a psychological refugee. That is the ambivalent space in which the colonial contact left us in. We can relate to Ladwong’s experience.