“Alienation at its most essential level is not poverty or unemployment. It is the inability to imagine your society and therefore to imagine yourself in it.”
- John Ralston Saul, On Equilibrium
BY Ojijo Pascal
The Luo Nation has been divided and spread since the great departure from Bar El Gazher.
The Luo Nation needs a sudden shock of reorientation within itself that will divorce us from the largely irrelevant problems of the various countries of which we finally settled, make it possible to speed necessary progress towards creation of the Luo Nation and to develop some new sense of identity, some feeling of being a people who can be described – even if incorrectly – as a nation, and act as if it were so.
We cannot afford to be anonymous, featureless, nothing-men and women. We need an identity.
There are many voices who have argued, and might even now argue that Luos have no national identity, and that we do not need one. In fact, some will argue that even something as simple as identifying one’s ancestors as Luo will lead to a sign of racial supremacist attitudes. That it would mean there was a secret master race that considered themselves pure Luos. It will however become clear that the Nation of Luos are by no means pure, no means seclusive, but a nation of related men and women, who have some identity, identity in the blood. Indeed, our blood I sony as pure as one of the parents, or grand parents, or great grand parents, having a luo blood, or such relationship.
Ironically, to say that Luos have no national identity is a common thing to say. In no otherepoch country would there be a large number of citizens saying that their homeland has no culture. Quite to the contrary, in most countries around the world, and in various times in history, over centuries, individuals are prepared to die to preserve their culture. Many will bear arms to protect their culture, vote against integration with other nations or impose sanctions on countries that threaten their ideology. They might ban immigration, lead rebellions against foreign influences or outlaw foreign ideas.
Luos lack of a strong culture does have some benefits. Arguably, Luos are the most free people on earth. While the rest of the world wallows in fear of cultural loss as a result of globalisation, Luos are assimilating foreign ideas and becoming stronger in the process. Such behaviour makes it easy to be optimistic about Luos future. As uos today, we have all names of even the altest technological advances, to mention but one…od mbui for internet…
As Charles Darwin once noted:
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive nor the most intelligent, but those most adaptive to change.”
Aside from being free to able to adapt to new ideas, as Luos we are free to criticise our government without being accused of shitting on the flag, and this is something we have done very well in various countries, with latest and most memorable being our brother who is now heading the White House.
Luos lack of unifying cultural identity, and the conformity pressures associated with culture, frees it of the worries of other nations.
But Luos freedom does come at an economic and spiritual cost. Economically, a nations culture is the brand that it trades on and this affects consumer demand for its ‘good’ and ‘services’. For example, Luo fashion brands like will succeed because they trade on Luo image as a proud, ambitious and aggressive nation. On the same vein, stylish fashion labels will succeed because of the sense that Luos are the most refined, classy and sophisticated of them all.
A national identity also affects whether Luos will support the dreams and ambitions of their compatriots. And this has been debated, that Luos are not well supportive of their own, citing the need to be seen to be objective and beyond tribal sentiments. This thinking however goes against the flow of the philosophy of Od Wadu, upon which dogma the house of padhola, or rightly, Jopadhola—the people of the wound—who were left behind in the great trek south because (you guessed it) one of the brothers developed a wound that forced him to stop, and other brothers of the house also stopped. Most Luos have a strong desire to see their compatriots achieve. Consequently, we need to rally our resources in support of national institutions that will lead to the exploitation of our cultures and individual potentials.
Out culture is as good in sports as it is found in the arts. In deed, The Luo Nation needs to see our cultural practices as assets. Such a culture makes it easy and productive for aspiring painters, musicians, directors, actors and playwrights to ever achieve their potential. It is simply too difficult to find compatriots who will lend a helping hand now, but this will be transcended once there is a move to unity energies behind the dream.
In many respects, there have been arguments that the people in the arts only have themselves to blame for limiting their own opportunities in life. However, artists do not compose, perform or critique for artists, but for the audience, the public, We need to be the public. Despite working in the cultural industries, they don’t believe Luos have a culture worth preserving, or that Luos have stories worth telling.
In the intellectual world, there is outright open success as Luo intellectuals in identity. There is a constant linkage between Luos culture and intellect.
In the absence of an Luo identity created by all of us, intellectuals will create an identity that is not necessarily in Luos interests. For intellectuals a social identity is an exercise in theory and concepts, without relevance to pragmatics. Their world is one where a theory only gains validity when their peers have accepted it, and alternative theories have been discredited. Once accepted by fellow intellectuals, their theories need to be accepted by the wider community. The community need to participate. You and I, we need to participate.
Consequently, intellectuals need to anchor their theories in some kind of national direction. They need to use to words like “we” and “moral responsibility..” to rally people behind them. They need to evoke some kind of shared values in order to persuade the Luo Nation to embrace some necessary changes. Most importantly, they need some kind of community spirit.
Although a national identity is not in everyone’s interests, and would result in the loss of many individual practices, I propose in this piece the use of diverse for strength, like a atonga, a basket, made of different grasses and climbers of different colour and form, in terms of length and even strength, it is better than the alternative of no national identity, and better than having the climbers through all over the laro, the compound. A Luo identity shall be seen a bit like an identity of a sporting club. A team ethic will naturally result in the individual sometimes needing to be sacrificed or being compelled to do things against their wishes. But what individuals can achieve if they work together is often far greater than what they can achieve if they work alone. Today, hence, acholi and luos; padhola and alur; shiiluk and jur-cho must learn to work together, as a nation. As the old saying goes, the whole is more than the sum of the parts. When tow sleep together, there is warmth. A rope of three strands is stronger than one of one strand. Yes! If the team benefits, so does every individual within it.
There was no strong concept of Luo identity even in our past, and in a past where there were conflicts, conquest and wards, The Luos chose to assimilate instead of conquer by force. This might have made us loose some in-group identity, but our culture subsists in other cultures.
