Among the Batooro people of western Uganda, there is a poem that does something remarkable. A drum — made from the stretched hide of a slaughtered cow — begins to speak. It does not celebrate the rhythms it creates or the ceremonies it anchors. Instead, it airs a grievance. It asks a question that its human audience has apparently never considered: do you not realise that I, too, feel pain?
The drum was once a living creature. It was sacrificed, its skin peeled away and stretched tight over wood, and now it is beaten endlessly — at festivals, at funerals, at royal courts — by people who never stop to think about what they are striking. The poem gives this silenced object a human voice and, through that voice, delivers an indictment of indifference. The people who depend on the drum’s music are the same people who ignore its suffering.
It is a small poem from a single community in the interlacustrine region of East Africa. But it carries a weight that exceeds its size, because it demolishes a persistent and deeply colonial idea: that traditional African cultures had no space for the voice of the victim.
The Myth of the Silent Victim
There is a strain of thinking — not always spoken aloud, but embedded in how African cultures are studied, taught, and compared to Western ones — that assumes pre-colonial African societies were hierarchical to the point of tyranny. In this framing, chiefs ruled absolutely, elders silenced dissent, and anyone at the bottom of the social order — women, the young, the defeated, the enslaved — simply endured. The victim, in this telling, had no voice, no platform, no recourse. Suffering was absorbed in silence.
This narrative served colonialism well. If Africans had no indigenous mechanisms for justice, accountability, or compassion, then the introduction of European courts, Christian morality, and written law wasn’t just modernisation — it was mercy. It framed the colonial project as a rescue operation: saving Africans not just from material poverty, but from moral poverty.
The problem is that it isn’t true. And the evidence against it doesn’t come from obscure academic journals. It comes from the cultures themselves — from their poems, their judicial traditions, their performance practices, and their proverbs. The Batooro drum poem is one thread in a continental tapestry of traditions that gave voice to those who suffered, and did so with a sophistication that Western justice systems are only now beginning to approach.
The Drum Speaks: Prosopopoeia as Protest
The literary technique at work in the Batooro poem has a name: prosopopoeia — the act of giving voice to an absent, silent, or inanimate entity. Western literary critics trace it to ancient Greece and Rome. What they less frequently acknowledge is that the technique was alive and thriving across the African continent, serving not merely aesthetic purposes but deeply political ones.
In the Batooro poem, the drum is not simply personified for poetic effect. It is personified to expose a moral failure. The cow that became the drum was killed for human benefit. Its hide was taken, its body consumed, and what remains of it is now beaten daily without acknowledgment. The poem forces the listener into an uncomfortable recognition: the instrument of your joy is also a record of someone else’s suffering. Your celebration is built on a sacrifice you have chosen to forget.
This is not a quaint folk curiosity. It is a moral technology. By placing the complaint in the mouth of an object, the poet sidesteps the social risks that come with direct accusation. No living person is named. No chief is challenged to his face. But the audience understands exactly what is being said: that power makes people deaf to the pain they inflict, and that those who serve are rarely asked how they feel about serving.
The Batooro are not alone in deploying this technique. Across the continent, African oral poets gave human attributes to rivers, hoes, animals, and instruments — not for whimsy, but to say what could not be said directly. In the Siswati poetic tradition, the poet Shongwe personified the native hoe — the lilembe — to invoke the legacy of King Shaka, embedding political commentary inside an address to a farming tool. In Malawi, the composer Joseph Nangalambe disguised political critique inside coded metaphors and allegory, singing in the Yao language about a mysterious figure called “Che Poison” whose true identity his audience understood perfectly. The object speaks so the person doesn’t have to. And in speaking, the object says what the person cannot safely say.
Under the Palaver Tree: Where Every Voice Was Heard
Poetry was not the only mechanism for amplifying the victim’s voice. Across West and Central Africa, the institution of the palaver tree served as a structured forum for communal deliberation, and it placed the testimony of the harmed at the very centre of the process.
The Congolese theologian Bénézet Bujo describes the palaver as a practice that creates physical, social, and psychological space for open communication — a space designed so that persons can be integrated into the life and expectations of their communities. Through the palaver, African communities healed sickness, educated their members about moral standards, and reconciled enemies. The process was, in Bujo’s framing, both anamnetic — rooted in remembering — and future-oriented. Healing was achieved not by silencing the past but by narrating it.
Compare this to the English Common Law tradition, which arrived in Africa through colonisation. In that system, the criminal case is structured as a contest between the state and the accused. The victim is, at best, a witness — someone who provides evidence for the prosecution’s case. The victim’s emotional testimony, their grief, their sense of violated dignity, is largely irrelevant to the legal question of guilt. The concept of a “victim impact statement” was not introduced into Western courtrooms until the 1970s and 1980s, and even now, its use is constrained and controversial.
African indigenous justice systems operated differently. Research on traditional African legal processes reveals that the victim was a direct party to proceedings — not a bystander. The court specifically considered the interests of the victim, the accused, and the wider society, with the explicit goal of restoring social cohesion through reconciliation. The underlying desire, as legal scholars have documented, was to promote reconciliation between disputing parties rather than merely to rule on the explicit dispute. The victim spoke. The community listened. And the resolution was designed to repair, not just to punish.
From Gacaca to Mato Oput: Justice That Centres the Wounded
The palaver was not an abstract principle. It took concrete institutional forms across the continent, many of which survived colonialism and are still practised today.
In Rwanda, the gacaca courts — whose name means “justice on the grass” — were originally forums where lineage headmen and family patriarchs resolved conflicts by sitting together on the grass, seeking truth, hearing from those who were harmed, and compensating victims through restitution. When the Rwandan government institutionalised gacaca after the 1994 genocide to process an overwhelming caseload that formal courts could not absorb, it was drawing on a tradition that had always placed the victim’s testimony at the heart of the process. Local leaders facilitated justice while fostering forgiveness — a model that, despite its imperfections, helped rebuild societal trust in the aftermath of unimaginable violence.
In northern Uganda, among the Acholi people, mato oput — the drinking of a bitter root — is a restorative justice ceremony that requires the perpetrator to hear and acknowledge the victim’s suffering before reconciliation can begin. The bitterness of the root is the point: it is meant to be tasted by both sides, a shared reminder that what happened was painful, and that moving forward requires both parties to swallow something difficult. The victim’s voice is not optional in this process. It is the mechanism through which accountability is established.
In Burundi, bushingantahe — councils of elders known as “people of integrity” — mediated disputes with an emphasis on hearing all parties. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the baraza served a similar function. In Sierra Leone, fambul tok — meaning “family talk” — was revived after the civil war as a community-driven reconciliation process rooted in the principle that victims must be heard before communities can heal. These are not imports. They are not Western frameworks translated into local languages. They are indigenous institutions, founded on African communitarian ethics, that made the voice of the victim structurally essential to the pursuit of justice.
The Praise Poet Who Could Also Criticise
Even in the most hierarchical of African traditional settings — the royal court — the voice of the aggrieved was not entirely suppressed. It was encoded.
The Zulu imbongi, the Yoruba oriki chanter, the Tswana maboko performer, the Asante kwadwumfo — these figures are often described in shorthand as “praise poets.” And they were. But scholarship on these traditions reveals something more complex: praise poets could also include derogatory remarks, veiled or otherwise, and offer advice as well as praise. The praise poem was not simply flattery. It was a negotiation between the powerful and the community that sustained them.
A Zulu imbongi could publicly remind a king of his obligations, hint at his excesses, or invoke the memory of better rulers past — all within the sanctioned form of “praise.” Some praise poems openly depicted the tyrannical or overpowering character of a ruler, making clear that although the people submitted to royal authority, they were not blind to its costs. This was institutionalised dissent dressed in the language of honour. And because the imbongi spoke from a position of cultural authority — as a custodian of communal memory — his words carried weight that no individual complainant could claim alone.
Women’s Dirges: Where Grief Became a Platform
Among the Akan of Ghana, the funeral dirge was the province of women. And it was far more than mourning.
Akan dirges, documented extensively by the ethnomusicologist J.H. Nketia, followed established conventions of metaphor and imagery — the deceased compared to a tree that gave shade and was hewn down, the shortness of life likened to a market woman whose goods sold out too quickly. But within these conventions, individual mourners had significant creative latitude. They could publicly celebrate the virtues of the deceased in ways that implicitly condemned those who lacked such virtues. They could lament the loss of a protector in terms that exposed the community’s failure to protect. The funeral became a licensed space for women to speak truths that ordinary social interaction might suppress.
These were not private tears. They were public performances, observed by the entire community, and their emotional force was understood as both genuine grief and social commentary. A woman chanting a dirge for a generous man was also, by implication, calling out the stinginess of those who remained alive. A mother mourning a child taken too young was also raising questions about the community’s responsibility for its most vulnerable members.
The dirge tradition existed across the continent in various forms — among the Ewe, the Ibo, the Mahi, the Sotho, and many others. Each had its own conventions, but the underlying function was consistent: the lament was a socially sanctioned space where pain could be voiced, and where that voicing carried moral authority precisely because it emerged from genuine suffering.
The Drum as Witness: Literature Without Paper
To return to the Batooro poem: the drum that speaks is not merely a metaphor. Across West and Central Africa, drums were recognised as what the scholar J.H. Nketia called “vehicles of literature.” Among the Yoruba, every type of poetry could be recited on the drum as well as spoken, and oriki praise poems were as frequently drummed as sung. Among the Akan, drums at funerals echoed the themes of dirges, carrying messages of condolence and farewell but also commentary.
The drum was not just an accompaniment to human expression. It was an independent voice. In Kele communities of the Congo, drums publicised births, marriages, deaths, and forthcoming events in formalised patterns that constituted a distinct literary genre. Among the Akan, drums accompanying a chief’s procession would “say”: I carry father: I carry father, he is too heavy for me, to which the bass drum replied: Can’t cut bits off him to make him lighter. This is wit, commentary, and social observation delivered through an instrument — proof that the African literary imagination did not wait for paper and ink to develop complexity.
The Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo understood this when he wrote his “Lament of the Drums,” a poem that fused Akan drum poetry with Igbo elegiac forms. For Okigbo, drums were not relics of a pre-literate past. They were a living literary technology, capable of expressing political grief, communal loss, and moral urgency. The drum could lament because the cultures that created it had always understood that even objects shaped by sacrifice carry the memory of what was given up.
What the Drum Is Really Saying
The Batooro drum poem is small enough to dismiss and large enough to rearrange how we think about African moral philosophy. What it demonstrates — alongside the palaver tree, the gacaca court, the funeral dirge, the praise poet’s coded criticism, and the talking drum’s commentary — is that traditional African cultures had multiple, overlapping systems for giving voice to suffering.
Some were institutional: councils of elders, community assemblies, judicial proceedings in which the victim was a full participant. Some were literary: poems, songs, drum compositions, and proverbs that encoded grievance in forms that could be repeated, remembered, and transmitted across generations. Some were performative: funeral dirges, praise poetry, and ceremonial commentary that turned public gatherings into spaces where difficult truths could be spoken under the protection of tradition.
None of these systems were perfect. Power still distorted outcomes. Men still dominated public discourse in many societies. Hierarchies still concentrated authority. But the claim that victims were simply silenced — that traditional Africa offered no mechanism for the powerless to be heard — is not a description of reality. It is a colonial projection, designed to justify the imposition of foreign systems by denying the sophistication of indigenous ones.
The West introduced victim impact statements in the 1970s and called it progress. African cultures had been structuring victim testimony into their justice processes for centuries. The West developed restorative justice as an alternative to punitive incarceration in the late twentieth century. African traditions had been practising restorative justice so long that they had proverbs about it.
And among the Batooro, someone once gave a drum a voice — the voice of a creature that was killed so others could celebrate — and asked the most human of questions: does anyone hear me?
The answer, embedded in the poem’s very existence, is: yes. Someone always did.
