Okot p'Bitek (7 June 1931 – 19 July 1982) was a Ugandan poet, who achieved wide international recognition for Song of Lawino, a long poem dealing with the tribulations of a rural African wife whose husband has taken up urban life and wishes everything to be westernised. Song of Lawino was originally written in the Acholi dialect of Southern Luo, translated by the author into English, and published in 1966. It was a breakthrough work, creating an audience among anglophone Africans for direct, topical poetry in English; and incorporating traditional attitudes and thinking in an accessible yet faithful literary vehicle. It was followed by the Song of Ocol (1970), the husband's reply. The "East African Song School" or "Okot School poetry" is now an academic identification of the work following his direction, also popularly called "comic singing": a forceful type of dramatic verse monologue rooted in traditional song and phraseology. Early life Okot p'Bitek was born in 1931 in Gulu, in the North Uganda grasslands. His father, Jebedayo Opi, was a schoolteacher, while his mother, Lacwaa Cerina, was a traditional singer, storyteller and dancer. His ethnic background was Acholi, and he wrote first in the Acholi dialect, also known as Lwo. Acholi is a dialect of Southern Luo, one of the Western Nilotic languages. At school he was noted as a singer, dancer, drummer and athlete. He was educated at Gulu High School, then at King's College, Budo, where he composed an opera based on traditional songs. He went on to study at universities in the United Kingdom. University He travelled abroad first as a player with the Ugandan national football team, in 1958. He gave up on football as a possible career, stayed in Britain, and studied education at the University of Bristol and then law at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He then took a Bachelor of Letters degree in social anthropology at the University of Oxford, with a 1963 dissertation on Acholi and Lango traditional cultures. It is reported that Oxford deliberately failed his Ph.D. in 1970. The dissertation was published nearly unchanged in 1971 as The Religion of the Central Luo by a Kenyan publisher. According to George Heron, p'Bitek lost his commitment to Christian belief during these years. This had major consequences for his attitude as a scholar of African tradition, which was by no means accepting of the general run of earlier work, or