When Okot p'Bitek surprised the world with Song of Lawino in 1966, he was recognized immediately as a major African poet. No other African writer--except possibly Christopher Okigbo of Nigeria--had made such an indelible impact with his first volume of verse, creating at one stroke a new poetic idiom so entirely his own. Most African poets writing in English and French were cultural mulattoes seeking self-consciously to fuse the two disparate traditions of verbal creativity on which they had been nurtured. Léopold Sédar Senghor, for instance, certainly owed as much to French surrealism as he did to the songs of the Serer people; Okigbo was literarily descended from Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Peter Thomas, as well as from anonymous Igbo bards; and J. P. Clark had deliberately imitated the techniques of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Japanese haiku, and Ijaw oral art while...