I told some friends I was going to Gulu for Alice Lakwena and the ghosts of the war she and Joseph Kony had waged in Northern Uganda, but this was a lie; I was there for Okot p’Bitek. The man selling tickets at the bus station in Kampala said something to me in Acholi — I didn’t understand him. Then he spoke to me in English. He was asking for my name. “Otieno,” I said. He looked at me, the obvious question on his face: Why, with a Luo name, hadn’t I understood his question? “I’m Luo, but from Kenya,” I explained. He handed me my ticket and said, “We are all the same.”

I got onto the bus, and after me came a retinue of traders: women in green aprons selling breakfast, and men in blue aprons selling power banks, chargers, watches, and bluetooth speakers. I bought nothing. The bus took five hours to fill up, and by the time we left the capital, the sun was halfway across the sky, the day almost gone. Cracks on the Karuma Bridge that goes over the Victoria Nile meant that buses headed North–whether to Gulu or Lira, or even further afield into South Sudan– had to pass through Murchison Falls National Park, a detour that added a few hours to the journey. By the time we entered the park, it was night, and so it meant that my first sighting of the version of the Nile that started from Lake Albert was in the dark, the surface of the river a glinting leering shadow. The story of Alice started here, for in 1986 she had walked more than a hundred kilometres from Gulu to this section of the river called Paraa. It was at Paraa that she received the spirit of Lakwena, one of numerous spirits that spoke to her. Lakwena instructed her to save the Acholi of Northern Uganda, first by working as a healer, then by waging war. The war that this sprouted rendered Gulu fundamentally unliveable for the next twenty years. This was a war that p’Bitek missed. He’d died four years earlier in his house in Kampala.

I reached Gulu at midnight. In the air were swarms of flying termites, and under streetlights children congregated with pails and basins to collect them. These would be fried and salted, before being eaten, their bodies sweet, crunchy and oily. My Airbnb host had provided several bodaboda operators’ numbers, and I called them one after another, until one who was awake and still working answered his phone. He came for me at the bus stop, and we set off to the house. In a few minutes we were out of the town, the motorbike moving through bush, between which we could see huts and more termites. I began to panic. I did not know this man, did not know where I was going, and knew no one in this town that had, for decades, been practically unlivable, ravaged by war and wanton killing. I imagined apparitions appearing from the bush, grizzly fighters here to kidnap me, or cut off my ears for not listening to their orders to respect curfews. These were the stories of Gulu I had grown up with.

*

If the war in Uganda in the 80s were a play it’d be a later period Arthur Adamov, short of a central discernible plot, long on characters trapped in a continuous crucible that they all reacted to. The logic was direct: all the different players wanted power. There was a roving cast of names, some more memorable than others: the intellectual-aspiring and murderous Milton Obote; the more murderous Idi Amin, newly deposed from power; the young Dar-trained radical Yoweri Museveni; the academic and Buganda insider Yusuf Lule; the career military man Bazilio Olara-Okello who overthrew Obote; and Tito Okello, his co-conspirator in the coup and successor as president. When, in January 1986, Museveni overthrew Tito Okello and seized power, both Okellos, each of them an Acholi soldier, fled Uganda. Immediately afterwards, thousands of disgruntled Acholi soldiers, loyal to the two of them, fled North to Acholiland, its biggest town Gulu. It was from there that the next phase of the war in Uganda arose, Alice Lakwena its progenitor.

Alice Auma was a fish-seller and part time sex worker operating in Gulu. Sometime in 1985 she went into Murchison Falls National Park, emerging forty days later with spirits which she said spoke to her and gave her instructions. The chief of these spirits was called Lakwena. After the fall of Tito Okello, she changed her messaging. Lakwena, she said, had advised that she had to wage war for the Acholi. They– the Acholi– were a special people, and they would heal Uganda from its troubles. Soon, many of the former soldiers, most of whom had become highwaymen and bandits, joined her. Their group, the Holy Spirit Movement, would march to Kampala.

This is one history of Gulu.

But there is another, older, more important history. This is the history of the Luo, a Nilotic group who emerged in present-day South Sudan midway through the previous millenium. Around a thousand years ago, some of them began to migrate downwards from Bahr el Ghazzal, along the Nile, and into present-day Uganda. Luo groups that remained in South Sudan — the Shilluk, the Anuak, Pari, Acholi, Balanda Boor, Thuri and the Luwo — are referred to as the Northern Luo. The Southern Luo are nowadays found in Uganda and Kenya. In Uganda, the Acholi are the biggest Luo group, while the Luo who live in Kenya (referred to simply as Luo) moved to Kenya from Uganda between the sixteenth and nineteenth century, with some eventually moving downwards into present-day Tanzania. And so, in going to Gulu from Kenya, I was taking the same journey in reverse, tracing the paths of my ancestors.

A lot of the early history of these Luo groups — particularly those in Uganda and South Sudan — had been written by the British Oxford-trained anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Much of his work was clouded by racist colonial tinctures, and, perhaps more damagingly, an inclination to interpret African spiritual practice using European Christian prisms. Then came two of Pritchard’s students, here to correct the incorrect frameworks he had established. The first to attempt this imagining was the Marxist academic Frank Girling, a British scholar who arrived in Acholiland. Girling quickly realised that what he needed to do was not necessarily an anthropological study of the Acholi, but a study of how Luo groups had been affected by the violence of British colonialism. Living in Gulu, he observed, “All the Europeans are subject to a greater or less degree to the current myths about the Acholi, which serve to maintain the unity and cohesiveness of the European group.” Soon, he had fallen out with the anthropological setup at Oxford, particularly his PhD supervisor Pritchard. His funding was cut, he was forced to remove the chapters of his thesis that attacked the British colonial infrastructure for destroying Acholi cultural structure, and he had difficulty finding permanent jobs in anthropology.  By the time he published his book, The Acholi of Uganda, in 1960, he had grown disenchanted with the entire enterprise of anthropology, dismissing it as a form of neo-colonialism.

In the same year Okot arrived at Oxford to do a PhD in anthropology. He was already, by then, a trained teacher, a published novelist (Lak Tar Miyo Kinyero Wi Lobo published in Luo in 1953), a qualified lawyer, and a former member of the Ugandan national football team. He had also, while training as a teacher, composed the Acholi anthem. Then he decided to study anthropology in the belief that the field would encompass his many interests. Among his supervisors at Oxford was Pritchard. There, he ran into the same blocks the Girling had faced before him. A. K. Kaiza writes, “Okot was not a Marxist. But for the system, he was something worse; he was a black man, a native […] If anthropology had thrived on a racist assumption about the darker races, how was a black man going to become an anthropologist?”

At the core of his intellectual interests was a study of Acholi spirituality and cosmology, and how it related to Christianity. However, now came the problems, similar to what Girling had encountered. Who were the Acholi? Pritchard had delineated the Luo into strict “ethnic groups”, but on the ground, things were different. How, for instance, were the Acholi different from the Jopadhola? How did they differ from the groups in Sudan and in Kenya? The languages were broadly similar, as were the cultural practices. Okot did not agree with the strictness of the idea of tribe that the entire field was encompassed in. Perhaps inevitably, his PhD was rejected twice, with Pritchard one of his examiners. It did not matter. He published most of it as The Religion of the Central Luo in 1971. 

By then, Okot was no longer living in Uganda. He was in Kenya. It had been an eventful decade. In October 1962, Uganda had attained independence, and Okot had returned to Gulu from Oxford, intending to stand for MP in Gulu under the banner of Milton Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress. It wasn’t a neat fit. The UPC was strongly Anglican (Okot had rejected Christianity), and advocated the kinds of “tribal” values Okot disdained. Nevertheless, he ran, and lost in the party’s primary to a more fitting candidate. He returned to Oxford, then in the mid-1960s he returned to Gulu, working there for Makerere University. In 1966, the seminal Song of Lawino was published. The epic poem, originally written in Acholi, bemoans how much of Acholi, and African tradition, had been destroyed by colonisation and Christianity. In Song of Ocol, published four years later and told from the point of view of Lawino’s husband, Ocol, the cynical narrator talks about the disappointments of independence in Uganda. “Did someone tell you/That on the morning of uhuru/The dew on the grass/Along the village pathways/Would turn into gold?”

Soon Okot was to become persona non grata in Uganda. Obote was president, and Idi Amin was commander of the army, and they both disliked him. In 1967 he lost his job, and moved to Kenya, to Kisumu, the town in Kenya I grew up in. He never lived in Gulu again. In 1971, Amin overthrew Obote, and presided over an orgy of murder. He killed thousands of Luo soldiers, dumped their bodies into the Nile at Karuma Bridge. In 1976, Okot went back to visit Gulu, but he was publicly threatened by Amin, and had to sneak out under cover of darkness. At the end of the decade Amin was deposed from power, and in 1982 Okot moved back to Uganda, to Kampala. Within a few months, he was dead. The Adamovian games had started. There were a lot of armies and even more generals, and in the fighting, after suffering a stroke in his house one night, the streets of Kampala were deemed too dangerous for him to go to hospital in the dark. He died in his house.

*

And so I, Okoth Otieno, a Luo speaker from Kenya, was in Gulu. I see it now; the termites that welcomed me on the first night and appeared every evening when the sun was gone; how young most of the people in the town were; the narrow streets on which the only vehicles seemed to be gigantic 4 by 4s; the motorbikes buzzing by; the way the town abruptly ended and everything turned into bush and farmland; the redness of the soil; the milk and ice sellers on every corner; the scent of the central market; and the buzz of the language — Acholi — around me. It hung in the air, an all-consuming ether.

In the poem “Cattle Egret”, Okot described a place that looked like Gulu, “Men drunk with kwete bee/Women cook goat meat/And make millet bread/But I am not here/To distribute the dishes.” He was not here to distribute the dishes, or to see what had become of his Gulu after the war.

The bulk of Okot’s reputation was built on his poems, particularly his song poetry — Song of Lawino, its companion Song of Ocol, Song of Malaya, and Song of Prisoner. The songs had been inspired by other poems that he had read and loved. He said once, “I don’t think they are very much influenced by the African oral tradition; they cannot be sung, for instance. Possibly they are influenced by The Song of Hiawatha by H. W. Longfellow and also by Song of Solomon. These books I enjoyed very much when I was a student and I consider Song of Solomon the greatest love song ever.” 

I had read bits of Song of Lawino in the original and understood it, but now the verbal Acholi escaped me. The encryption was simple, but I didn’t have its key. The pronunciations were slightly different, as were the areas of emphasis and tenor. Every few minutes, bits of conversations would break through the morass of my mind and I’d understand what was being said — something about football, someone bargaining with someone else at the market — but then, with a shift I’d lose it, and strain to recover my understanding of the language. 

I tired of my eavesdropping. I knew what I was here to do. I had to see Okot’s grave. I called a bodaboda person and asked him to take me to the Anglican Church cemetery where he was buried. It would have been funny if it wasn’t sad. Okot, buried in a church. The church, St. Philip’s Cathedral, was an unremarkable edifice, cream with peeling paint. To its left was the cemetery. It was tiny, with about twenty gravestones.

There were two people seated on some chairs on the verandah of the church, little children playing on the ground around them. From inside the church came the sound of the organ, and in the air rain clouds had gathered, grey and heavy. I asked the two if they knew where Okot p’Bitek’s grave was. They didn’t, and neither did they know who that was, but they pointed at the graves. You can look and check, they said.

I walked through the gravestones. Some of the graves had flowers on them. His was not one of these. His was overgrown with grass, the writing on the gravestone fading away. I sat down on the ground before it. What to say, what to think? Here lay Okot p’Bitek, Africa’s greatest poet. I, like Okot, lost my Christianity years ago, but I was seized by a sudden desire to close my eyes and pray. I said a prayer for his soul. I opened my eyes. There was a heavy spiritual presence washing over me. The sounds of the church had gone mute. I didn’t notice them any more. I thought of my novel, and of those of other Kenyan and Ugandan novelists I knew. I had taken to joking with one of my Ugandan writer friends that maybe East African writers were not meant to finish their novels. Her own book, based on Alice Lakwena, had been due for years, and she was still working on it. I prayed for all the East African novelists I knew. I was at Okot’s grave, after all. Maybe this was what we all needed.

But what a writer Okot had been. His writing was luminous: the song poetry; the anthropological work; the novel; an opera written in Acholi when he was still in high school; the other shorter poems, some urgent and political, others cynical, and yet others elided in mischief. Like “Return the Bridewealth”, inspired, some allege, by the story of his divorce from his first wife Mary in 1966. When the two separated, she wrote him a cheque for the amount he had paid to her family as bride price. In the poem, published in 1971 as part of the vaunted anthology Poems from East Africa, Okot writes, “I tell the woman I cannot trace her father./I say to her I want the bridewealth that my father/paid when we wedded some years ago/[…]Hm! She sighs!/She is silent!/I am silent!/[…]/She takes out a new purse/She takes out a cheque./[…]/She screams/Here, take it! Go and marry your bloody woman!/I open the cheque/It reads/Shillings One thousand four hundred only!”

*

The next day, I went back to the town. I was reading a book, Heike Behrend’s Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits, and intended to finish it in a cafe while I had my dinner. Lakwena’s Holy Spirit Movement had attracted followers from Northern Uganda, each of whom believed in the message Alice was giving them. Kaiza, a student in Northern Uganda at this time, who was displaced from school because of the HSM and essentially made to survive in the bush as a child, writes, “And there, as we ask about, comes the single gunshot, the high whine of a military truck racing back to town, and then the preternatural sight of the men, the fighters of the rebel prophetess, Alice Lakwena, shirtless, in their black shorts, their torsos glistening in the sun from shea butter, which we later learned had been smeared to bounce off bullets.”

The HSM ultimately lost, most of Alice’s soldiers killed by Museveni’s forces outside Jinja in late 1987. Alice fled to Kenya where she lived the rest of her days. In the book, Behrend uses the work of Okot to explain the spiritual structure of HSM, as well as the cosmology of the Acholi, and why people were eager to believe in Alice’s spirits. Okot was now the ranking intellectual mover of Acholi, and Luo religion, not Pritchard. The Oxford model had been vanquished from these parts.

After the fall of the HSM, a new group emerged to fill the void. It coalesced around a man from Gulu District called Joseph Kony. He claimed to be Alice’s cousin, and to also be in receipt of spirits who would deliver the Acholi their salvation. His group became known as the Lord’s Resistance Army. The LRA is responsible for most of the killing that occurred in Northern Uganda in the past thirty years. While ostensibly claiming to be fighting for the Acholi, most of their victims were Acholi themselves. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, tens of thousands of children kidnapped to become child soldiers, and much of Northern Uganda made the site of macabre violence by their fighters. The LRA enforced strict curfews, and cut off the body parts or killed those who didn’t obey their orders. In Gulu, the Ugandan journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo told me, up to 50,000 people would leave their homes early evening in a 10km or so radius from Gulu, and come to spend the night on the streets of Gulu, Lacor Hospital, and inside St Philips Cathedral (where Okot is buried) and its grounds. These were known as the night commuters. Every night for years, they did the walk, going to their villages in the morning to farm, and returning to the safe zones in town in the evening to sleep. Often, they arrived in the town while on the verge of death, whether from sickness or from hunger, and some would fail to wake up in the morning. When they died, they were buried wherever they had fallen, in mass unmarked graves. Every day, for years, the cathedral buried them on its lawn, around the graveyard. Okot didn’t see this war, but thousands of its victims are buried around him.

In the Acholi anthem that Okot composed, the singers praised Acholiland. “Lobo Acholi wamari mada/Piny-nye ber laporre pe/Joo Acholi gigeno in keken/Cwiny-gi yom pi kwo kany ba” (Acholiland, we love you very much/Your beauty is incontestable/The Acholi people love only you/Living in this land brings them joy). But in this new Kony-infused reality, the beauty of Acholiand was not what one immediately thought of, nor was joy the primary emotion Kony had brought.

In 2004, the LRA was pushed out of Northern Uganda, its fighters present only in pockets like Murchinson’s Falls National Park, and Gulu gradually became safe again. But the fallen night commuters have remained buried. Onyango-Obbo told me, “Ever since the war ended over 20 years ago, no one has spoken of digging up the graves. Hardly anyone mentions it, but they are all aware. Everyone is terrified of what they will find. But mostly of the burden of it – for you dig and find remains of 2,500 people, then what?” 

I took a bodaboda into town, Behrend’s book in my backpack. The bodaboda rider, an effusive man called Fred, and I talked about Acholi and the Luo I spoke. Our number systems were the same, and he laughed when he realised that I understood some of what he was saying. I asked him if he had been born in Gulu. No, he was not, he said. He was from Gulu, and he was born in Oyam, an hour’s drive away. His parents had fled Gulu because of Lakwena and Kony. I paused. His pronunciation was weird. Whereas I pronounced the name in the English way — kow-nee — each syllable distinct, Fred’s was pronounced as one syllable with the soft “ny” at the end. Of course. It made sense. It was a Luo name. I had been saying his name wrong all my life, because I had heard about him from Western media. Immediately I realised I knew what his name meant. “Does his name mean help?” I asked Fred. “Is he Joseph the helper?”

He was enthusiastic in his response. “Yes yes, you’re right. Helper.”

Another name came to my mind. Okot p’Bitek. His first name was Okot. I had been thinking of his name wrong. It was a Luo name. One of my Luo names was Okoth. Were they the same name, with the h added in Kenya? I asked Fred, “Does Okot mean someone born when it’s raining?”

“Yes,” he said.

It was an eerie moment of illumination. I felt both foolish and buoyant at the same time. Of course, Okot and Okoth were the same name. He and I had the same name. All these years of studying his work, and writing about him, and it had never occurred to me. How stupid was I?

I thought then of an uncle of mine after whom I was named. A playwright in Nairobi in the eighties and early nineties, he had dropped his English name Martin, and adopted a new moniker: Okoth k’Obonyo. Obonyo was the family name, so I had always assumed it was an anti-colonial renaming. When he died in his twenties, largely from his alcoholism, he was buried on my father’s birthday, and my father, in his grief, named his oldest son after his dead brother. Now, I thought about the “k” and the apostrophe. I had always dismissed it as an unimportant affectation. But, I wondered, he was a writer, he was called Okoth, and he was a poet and playwright. Had he put the “k’” because of Okot’s “p’”? 

Fred stopped in front of a bar. Here, I could find food. He himself was going elsewhere, to a club to dance until morning. “But call me when you’re ready to leave,” he said. “I’ll come for you.”

I went in, and ordered food and a drink. Only one other table was occupied, and the waitress served us both: we were both having pilau. As I ate, I thought about Okot. I understood my uncle’s supposed compulsion to rename himself after Okot. Okot was one of our literary gods. The idea of him loomed over everything. And yet he had died early, at 51. What would have become of him had he lived longer? What would he have made of the war that bedevilled his home? What would he have made of Museveni as president? What more would he have written? Would he have written about Lakwena? In “Cattle Egret”, he had written, “They are singing a war song/I want to join them/In the wilderness/And chase Death away.” But it was he, the poet of Gulu, who had been taken away.  

Cover image is Okot p’Bitek’s final resting place, photographed by Carey Baraka