The state, prostitutes and teachers: Reading Okello Oculi’s 'Prostitute'

There was no stealth, no shame. The affair took place in full view of assembled villagers. The village leadership assisted in the crime. The village chief and his wife made the arrangements. They carefully crafted and choreographed the scene. The setting was the chief’s large compound in the centre of the village where the ceremony honouring the visiting minister of state took place. There amidst the dancing, singing and merrymaking the minister abducted the unsuspecting girl. Rosa was one of the young girls brought in by the chief’s wife to serve refreshments to assembled local and visiting dignitaries. But even a fool could see now that Rosa was brought in to serve the big man’s pleasure.

Yet at that moment of her abduction, except for the girl’s mother there is not a voice of protest raised from among the assembled villagers. It was as if they did not see, bowing as they did before the incarnation of power. Yes your honour. Was it true what a campus drunk once said? Ee hardo not to be a tyrant in Africa. The get away was drama in itself.

‘… the car roared into the ears of the silence of the village and its torch lights drove out of the village into the darkness in front.’ (Okello Oculi, 1968, p.21)

At the back of the speeding black Mercedes in her bare feet the youth sat defiantly. Contempt, such as came only from the truly innocent, was written large in her eyes. She watched the grotesque bundle of fat sitting next to her, only yesterday one amongst the villagers. She wished she could murder him. Thoughts of her mother, of her friends, and of life in the village now fast receding in the distance, raced through her mind. Ice cold water ran along her spine. Rosa suspended existence.

In the capital where the car was headed, where she had never been before, she would be sexually assaulted, raped and cast to the wide, open city to face the life of prostitution. Now instinctively she shut her mind against the world. The song of Christendom now returning to her from Sunday school, in bits and pieces, seemed to mock her. Then am I dead to all the world and all the world is dead to me. She felt like a prisoner before the scaffold. But a new spirit rose within her and gave her courage.

'Prostitute' is the work we are discussing, a fast-moving early post-colonial piece of writing published by a young Makerere University student back in 1968. The novel’s novelty and singularity at the time was its thoroughly local setting and easily recognisable set of characters. People could identify, if not themselves then their circumstances, in the work. It was a thoroughly contemporary piece of writing. Students at Makerere University could not get over the fact that their robust and colourful lifestyles were celebrated in the work. Their enthusiasm pushed the work to the top of the bestseller list in East Africa.

When a group of young city barmaids heard about the novel and began reading it, they found their own stories there. It became an impassioned group reading. The smug lobby of the Gardenia became a seminar room. Every turn of the page was exhilarating. They cheered, and coursed. Every misfortune suffered by the young heroine was theirs. Every victory she won, no matter how little, was theirs. The state rose before their eyes and appeared as what it really was, a monster.
When state power intruded in the village and plucked Rosa and flung her into the dungeons of the city, the reading became a riot. The girls were a football team whose side was cheated out of victory. Rosa’s life in the village had been idyllic. In Rosa’s story they read their own stories. They saw their own ruined lives. Prostitutes! Every Tom, Dick and Harry called them. Can’t a girl earn a living without harassment?

As the story progressed the girls were appalled, but they were also delighted. They did not know that their life could become a book. They had no idea there were in the city some gentle spirits. All they encountered was abuse and insults. But here on the pages of this novel they found a friend. It was as if Michael Jackson was calling to them. You are not alone, we will bring salvation back, where there is love there is hope, just call my name and I will be there. The poet Okot ‘p Bitek was yet to write the 'Song of Malaya', the work in which prostitutes find their own voice, in which prostitutes challenge and defy the state and heap scorn on the hypocrisy of society:

‘Let parliamentarians
Debate and pass laws
Against us
Let the police arrest us
And lock us up
In their cells
Let the magistrates
Sentence us to jails
But
Who can command?
The sun
Not to rise in the morning’

In the novel 'Prostitute' the minister of state is full of scorn about teachers. On the same night in which he abducted and violated Rosa he told teachers, 'The government will soon leave the business of governing to you people if you think you can do better.' But first he would arrest them all. 'Where were you,' he sneered, hitting his chest, 'when I and His Excellency and our comrades in power were fighting the white man? Where were the teachers?'

Thus began the dismantling of the education system in post-colonial Africa. Something the soldiers, under military rule, would greatly accelerate. The soldiers came to view teachers, especially the universities, as competitors, for scarce resources, who must be beaten down to size. In the eyes of the soldiers scare resources included women. Thus education was downsized. Many now believe here lies the cause and the curse of the backwardness in Africa of the last 50 years. Where Korea, Singapore and Malaysia were shooting ahead Africa was headed in the opposite direction, because its leaders scorned education and embraced corruption. To depart from education is to be corrupt.

Yet the post-colonial state was in reality a teacher’s state, or it ought to have been. The nationalist movement that brought independence to the vast majority of African countries was inspired by teachers, or at any rate by the products of the school system such as they were under colonial rule. In the post-colonial state teachers were in government, they were in parliament, and often they headed the state itself. Yet the conditions of teachers left in the classrooms and the enormous prestige they enjoyed under colonialism began to wane with independence.

'Why say they could leave the teachers to [govern] and yet threaten to imprison them if they continued to talk against the [government]'?

'Should the teachers fight too, like the way he [the minister] says they fought against the white people?'

Rosa’s sharp mind churned through the hypocrisy and the cynicism of the minister of state. She became convinced struggle was the only way forward. The group reading the story in the lobby of the Gardenia in downtown Kampala agreed. Away with sham independence, here was the beginning of the struggle throughout Africa that became known as the second liberation, the struggle that would itself in the end run aground with a new set of leaders even more corrupt. What was Africa to do?

The story of Tichuona Nyamubaya of Zimbabwe, on the radio in 2008 on the BBC World Service, illustrated this predicament perfectly. In many ways the Zimbabwean’s story ran parallel to that of Okello Oculi’s Rosa. At the age of 15 when just out of high school Tichuona enrolled in the rebel army then fighting white minority rule in Rhodesia.

At the training camp for new recruits she is repeatedly raped by the camp commandant. The experience makes her bitter and disheartened. It does not help that she found that other girls at camp were similarly abused. They complain to higher authorities but are ignored and the abuse continues. Tichuona survived and still rose to become an officer in the liberation army.

Liberation fighters returned home in triumph to form the new Zimbabwe. But Tichuona had seen enough. She knew the new leadership would run the country as they ran the camp. They would be corrupt, they would be brutal and merciless. She warns of the dangers ahead. In the euphoria that attended independence she is dismissed as a spoiler. Why are you saying these things? Let us celebrate.

Tichuona could have swallowed her pains and hurts. She could have become a minister of state, hurting and humiliating others in return. Instead Tichuona turned to poetry and music. Today Tichuona’s artistic voice forms part of the efforts seeking a new way forward for the beleaguered county.

A dozen years separate real-life Tichuona from Oculi’s fictional Rosa, but the two girls have much in common. Both were underage kids, both were violated and abused by men of the new post-colonial state. Both are disheartened and feel terribly let down. But both chose to continue in the struggle for a better tomorrow. It is interesting how women fictionally and in real life are at the forefront of the struggle for the future in Africa.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* John Otim is a Ugandan teaching at Nigeria's Ahmadu Bello University.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.