This book presents important works about the Acholi in Uganda in one volume. Frank Knowles Girling's The Acholi of Uganda and Okot p'Bitek's The Religion of the Central Lwo, African Religions in Western Scholarship and Acholi Love. Girling was writing about the Acholi at the time Okot was a teenager. They were also both introduced to anthropology in England by some of the same people, and they were both outsiders. Girling was a Marxist and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. He was actually thrown out of Uganda when he invited Indian independence activists to visit him. He was subsequently refused access to the UK anthropology establishment and became a sociologist - working on the working class in Glasgow. Okot was one of the most important of all African poets. His approach to anthropology is polemical and engaging.

For centuries Western scholarship, and the African scholars seduced by this body of knowledge, have not been interested in African "religions" per se, but what was worse, African scholars began not to study indigenous African spirituality on its own terms but through European eyes and intellectual categories. Okot p'Bitek, who is best known for Song of Lawino, was one of the first African scholars to call attention to this situation and argue African scholars need not "Hellenize" African spiritual practices and ideas and that what we have come to think as "African religions" are European versions in African disguise. This publication, along with a new introduction by Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu, reintroduces a classic work to a new generation, especially for those with an interest in African spiritual cultures and in need of "decolonizing" them so that they be studied, appreciated, and engaged on their own cultural and historic terms.

Poet, philosopher and artist, these poems from the distinguished Ugandan writer won the 1972 Kenyatta Prize for Literature. Song of Prisoner confronts the tragedy of Africa's decade of freedom. He traverses the whole spectrum of her political sickness and contrasts it with the enduring reality of the bush - roots of family and clan, and the optimism of Africa's children in the face of hunger, hardship and humiliation. Song of MalayaI, in lighter vein and contrast, is a harshly beautiful, lusty farce about the hypocrisy and cant of Africa's modern moralists.

A new translation of the late Okot p'Bitek's classic epic poem 'Wer pa Lawino', first published in Acholi in 1969, and recently listed in Africa's 100 Best Books. Lawino is a female voice, taking issue with her husband whom she witnesses imitating a European culture which is destroying a more deeply rooted African culture.