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. After being sacrificed, its skin was peeled away and stretched tight over seasoned wood. Now it is beaten endlessly at ceremonies 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 Great Lakes region of East Africa. Yet it carries an immense weight because it actively demolishes a persistent, deeply colonial idea, the false notion that traditional African cultures lacked space for the voice of the victim.
The Myth of the Silent Victim
There is a strain of thinking embedded in how African cultures are studied and compared to Western ones, that assumes that precolonial African societies were hierarchical to the extent of being totally tyrannical. In this extreme polarisation, chiefs governed with impunity while dissent was firmly stifled. Life was lived at the bottom of the social hierarchy with no way out. It is said that those without power were swallowed up in silence.
This narrative served colonialism well. The imposition of European institutions was presented as mercy rather than subjugation by claiming that Africans lacked systems of justice and moral responsibility. It saw the colonial project as a liberating process, a salvation from moral poverty in Africa.
The problem is that it isn’t true. The evidence against this idea comes directly from the cultures themselves, preserved in their traditions and oral literature. The Batooro drum poem is one example of a broader tradition in which African societies created space for the voices of those who suffered.
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 the absent or the voiceless. 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 deeply political purposes rather than mere aesthetic ones.
In the Batooro poem, personification is there to reveal a deep moral sin. The cow that became the drum was killed for human benefit. Its hide was taken and its body consumed. What remains is beaten daily without acknowledgment. The poem forces the listener into an uncomfortable recognition that 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.
It's a very advanced 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 and no chief is challenged to his face, but the audience understands exactly what is being said. Power makes people deaf to the pain they inflict, and those who serve are rarely asked how they feel about serving.
The Batooro are not alone in deploying this technique. Across Africa, oral poets used personification 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. He was 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. In both examples, the object speaks so the person doesn’t have to, and in speaking, it 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 space for open communication, designed so that people 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. In Bujo's framing, the process was both rooted in remembering and oriented toward the future. Healing was achieved through narration rather than silence.
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 to provide 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. 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 the harm.
From Gacaca to Mato Oput: Justice That Centres the Wounded
The palaver took concrete institutional forms across the continent, many of which survived colonialism and are still practised today.
In Rwanda, gacaca courts took their name from the grass where communities gathered to resolve disputes. Traditionally, local elders heard testimony, established responsibility, and arranged compensation for those who had been harmed. 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 central to this process, and serves 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 institutions are indigenous and founded on African communitarian ethics. They 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 often encoded rather than expressed directly.
The Zulu imbongi, the Yoruba oriki chanter, the Tswana maboko performer, and the Asante kwadwumfo are often described in shorthand as “praise poets.” Scholarship on these traditions reveals a more complex role. Praise poets could include derogatory remarks, veiled or otherwise, and offer advice as well as praise. The praise poem functioned as 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. 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 functioned as more than a form of 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, and 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 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 because it emerged from genuine suffering.
The Drum as Witness: Literature Without Paper
Returning to the Batooro poem, the speaking drum carried meanings that extended beyond 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 served as both an accompaniment to human expression and 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 social observation delivered through an instrument, showing that African literary traditions developed forms of complexity that did not depend on paper and ink.
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 a living literary technology, capable of expressing political grief and communal loss. The drum could lament because the cultures that created it understood that objects shaped by sacrifice carried memory.
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, including councils of elders and judicial proceedings in which the victim was a full participant. Some were literary, including poems, songs, and proverbs that encoded grievance in forms that could be repeated and transmitted across generations. Others were performative, including funeral dirges and praise poetry that turned public gatherings into spaces where difficult truths could be spoken under the protection of tradition.
None of these systems were perfect, as power still distorted outcomes, men still dominated public discourse in many societies, and hierarchies still concentrated authority. The claim that victims were simply silenced, and that traditional Africa offered no mechanism for the powerless to be heard, is inconsistent with the historical record. It reflects a colonial projection that justified 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, yet African cultures had been structuring victim testimony into their justice processes for centuries. Restorative justice emerged in the West as an alternative to punitive incarceration in the late twentieth century, while African traditions had practised restorative forms of justice for so long that they had proverbs about them.
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 a simple question: does anyone hear me? The poem survives because people did.
