He travelled abroad first as a player with the Ugandan national football team, in 1958. He gave up on football as a possible career, stayed in Britain, and studied education at the University of Bristol and then law at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.[5] He then took a Bachelor of Letters degree in social anthropology at the University of Oxford, with a 1963 dissertation on Acholi and Lango traditional cultures.
It is reported that Oxford deliberately failed his Ph.D. in 1970.[6][7] The dissertation was published nearly unchanged in 1971 as The Religion of the Central Luo by a Kenyan publisher.[8]
According to George Heron, p'Bitek lost his commitment to Christian belief during these years. This had major consequences for his attitude as a scholar of African tradition, which was by no means accepting of the general run of earlier work, or what he called "dirty gossip" in relation to tribal life. His character Lawino also speaks for him, in some places, on these matters.
