16 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographyspoken about his grandmother as a “typical white person,” we may perhaps be allowed here to use
this same method of sampling to make some generalizations about the Luo. Let us use the first Luo
we meet, in this case Ochollo-Ayayo himself, as a typical Luo person, and factor in the analysis he
provides as well as critical reactions to his work, some of them also from Luos. In this way we may
get at least a few insights into Luo ideology and mentality.
The overall profile of the Luo is that they are clever, lazy, and love showboating. Ochollo-Ayayo
goes further, writing about “virtue boasting,” which comes complete with virtue songs and virtue
names or praise names. The Luo cultivate witchcraft and sorcery, although they have increasingly
turned in recent decades to independent churches. The Luo have been studied for the practice of
geophagy (dirt eating) among children.
In a review of Hans-Egil Hauge’s Luo Religion and Folklore (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1974),
Ocholla-Ayayo lectures Hauge about using the wrong terminology in a discussion of polygamy
among the Luo: “Rather than saying that the Luo are polygamous, it would have been more
accurate to say that they practice polygyny [meaning, they have multiple wives at the same time].
The word ‘polygamy’ is ambiguous. It is also inaccurate that ‘by counting the number of huts one
can tell from a distance how many wives a man has,’” since some huts do not correspond to wives,
but may be used for other purposes, such as sleeping quarters for children. Ocholla-Ayayo, who
taught at Khartoum in the Sudan, is so pedantic that he berates Hauge, who published his book in
1974, for not citing a book that Ocholla-Ayayo published two years later, in 1976.
Much of this review is devoted to a discussion of the evil spirits (jachien), and especially the
jajuok otieno, the night-runner or evil spirit who comes to steal cattle. This is an issue treated in
Obama’s Dreams. E.E. Evans-Pritchard, the famous British intelligence figure and professor of
sociology at Oxford, did field work among the Luo in 1936, and produced articles like “Marriage
Customs of the Luo of Kenya” and “Ghostly Vengeance of the Kenya Luo,” Man 133 (1950). Evil
spirits are often those of grandparents who afflict grandchildren because these latter have failed to
carry out their filial duties. The night-runners become a large issue in Obama’s memoir (Dreams
435 and passim). Ocholla-Ayayo’s work is a “brittle inventory” of Luo norms, discussing questions
like pastoralism, the role of cattle and their value, kinship, polygamy/polygyny, and the premises of
Luo reasoning.
Ocholla-Ayayo’s critics tell us more than he does. These reviewers are themselves
anthropologists who deal in academic jargon, but they cannot suppress bursts of annoyance and
resentment at the author because of his pedantic, pompous, lecturing and hectoring method. One
reviewer writes that while the data presented by Ocholla-Ayayo are worthwhile, “the mannered and
often incoherent fashion in which they are presented is likely to alienate even the most well-
disposed of readers.” (Elizabeth Hopkins, ASA Review of Books 5 [1979], 216) This same reviewer
finds this Luo writer’s “belabored pronouncements” to be “verging at times on the tautological.”
There is also a tedious parade of erudition which the reviewer finds insufferable: “One must also
lament Ocholla-Ayayo’s determination to validate the monograph to the scholarly community. The
consequence is an accretion of self-conscious citations in which a hagiography as diverse as
Galatians, David Hume, and Adam Smith is invoked, as well as a multitude of modern
philosophers, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, and jurists. Frequent and gratuitous
references to university mentors also prove regrettably intrusive and distracting.” This reviewer
concludes that the “fragmented, a temporal presentation of the material and the author’s failure to
explore the behavioral as well as the normative dimensions of traditional Luo ideology seriously
undermine its value for the general reader.” The lack of historical analysis is a key defect.