Song of Lawino
An Acholi wife sets out, in her own idiom and to anyone who will listen, what her husband has become since he took up books, party politics and a mistress who straightens her hair and dances in the dark to gramophone records. She measures clocks against the sun, tinned food against millet, hymns against the songs of her own courtship, and asks why the new ways require the old ones to be despised. Composed first in Acholi and self-translated, it changed what East African poetry in English was allowed to sound like.
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