Wach: Luo Verbal Art as Courier of Traditional Justice

• In Event: Indigenous Knowledge of Social Justice Education: Lessons on Decolonization From Luo Language and Literature

Abstract

The Luo, a Nilotic community largely found in the expanse of East, and less in Central and West Africa, have over the centuries developed a body of verbal art wherein can be discerned the deep concern with fairness, goodness and rightness. In it all is found a subtle proposition of the moderation of power. Dholuo, the language of the Luo, through oral (also written, with the advent of Latin script) arts forms abound with texts that present diametrical panes for the audience to interpret and to locate justice or lack of it. Since this enterprise is manifested in the verbal forms, attention must be focused on the morphological packages that host and accentuate the concepts relating to justice or miscarriages of it. Wach - the word(s) - become the evidential granary from which metaphors of truth must be juxtaposed to the unacceptable dialectical opposites that are untrue, wrong, abusive and unfair. Wach, the word, is treated here as a polysemic term encompassing either a single term or groupings of words that conceptually signify fair, truth, good, equal or the semantically antonymic variants -unfair, untrue, bad, unequal. Thus, in Luo (Dholuo) proverbs, sayings, panegyrics, tales, songs are found whole texts or isolated word-forms signifying justice. Communities, down in history, compose literary texts in song and dance, in narrative and rendition, in pithy forms and utterance so that these are committed to memory or writing in order to preserve and also disseminate them to both the existing and the ever envisaged generations to follow. The human language has become the packaging by which (Ng’eyo) knowledge(s) is passed on within the community and beyond the said people through the sands of time. Luo knowledge(s) on and about teko (power), power-play and the administration of it that would lead to situations of interpretation of the administering of power as being just or otherwise are usually reposited in language-generated art-forms. Dhok - the language of the Luo becomes not only the repository but also the indispensable courier of knowledge(s) on power and justice, the dissemination of which is also actualized in dhok - the language. On grave matters such as justice, there develops a particularized register which hoists issues justice to the sacred level of thought to which they must belong. This, we shall attempt to demonstrate by foregrounding, at least, a selection of Wach (plural:Weche) - word(s) of the proposed register. With the register we shall be arguing that Wach is the ontological situs of justice among the Luo people to which any programme on justice education in regard the Luo must turn.

Author

• Owen McOnyango, Maseno University
  Presenting Author