TABAN LO LIYONG (ca.1939-), Ugandan poet, critic, novelist, and short-story writer, was born of Ugandan parents in southern Sudan. He received his early education at Gulu High School and the Sir Samuel Baker School, and subsequently studied at a teachers' college in Uganda, at Howard University, USA (BA), and at the University of Iowa, USA, where he was the first African to receive the MFA degree in creative writing and where he cultivated his unconventional writing style. He has taught at several universities, including the University of Papua New Guinea, the University of Nairobi in Kenya, where he co-founded the department of literature with Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Juba University in Khartoum, Sudan. A former cultural affairs director in southern Sudan, he teaches at the University of Venda in South Africa.

No single distinctive style or voice dominates Taban's aesthetic. His work assimilates oral traditions, conscious and unconscious integration of heterogeneous sources, fragmented utterances, and a prosaic diction with little or no regard for a coherent logical sequence. Fixions and Other Stories (1969), filled with Luo mythology and folktales, is an example of his experimentation with the short story as genre, while Meditations in Limbo (1970), which creates a persona who acts antithetically with his father, is more or less a novel. Both, despite their structural flaws, demonstrate his strong sense of commitment to the indigenous culture and oral tradition as a viable source of literary imagery. The poems in Frantz Fanon's Uneven Ribs (1971), Another Nigger Dead (1972), Thirteen Offensives against Our Enemies (1973), and Ballads of Underdevelopment) (1976) employ contrast, paradox, irony, innuendo, repetition, humour, cradle song, gossip, and surprise. 'With Purity Hath Nothing Been Won' (in Another Nigger Dead), for example, argues that success is never achieved through honesty, contrasting 'purity' and 'impurity' to draw the moral that evil ultimately triumphs over good and surprising with the premise that evil predominates over good, which runs counter to traditional belief. Echoes of other writers reverberate in his work, especially in some of the title poems. For example, 'The Marriage of Black and White' recalls Blake's 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell', while 'Telephone Conversation Number Two' echoes Wole Soyinka's 'Telephone Conversation', demonstrating his affinity with other writers and his ability as an experimental poet to borrow and adapt and move with the times.

The Last Word (1969) is a critical study that centres on African traditional values, African literature, and such authors as Okot p'Bitek and Amos Tutuola to comment on what Taban characterizes as 'East African literary barrenness'. He envisions a vanishing literary landscape of 'mountains', 'valleys', 'lakes', and 'waterfalls' that he hopes to rebuild with authentic literary beauty. His symbolism is clear enough: African literary sterility is attributable to European colonialism, specifically Western authors who not only distorted African history and culture but painted a grim view of the continent for selfish considerations. For Taban, the true picture of Africa, its people, and its culture can best be rendered by Africans themselves. Eating Chiefs: Lwo Culture from Lolwe to Malkal (1970), Another Last Word (1990), and Culture Is Rustan (1991) contain essays about culture, people, places, politics, and his personal philosophy about life, employing pun, irony, humour, and wit to elaborate his satirical perspectives. His recent poetry has been collected in The Cows of Shambat: Sudanese Poems (1992), Words That Melt a Mountain (1996), which was inspired by a stay in Japan, and Carrying Knowledge up a Palm Tree (1997).

[Source: Contemporary Africa Database]