By: Chioma Madonna Ndukwu
Africa’s Talking Drum: Under The Tree, Nothing Changed In Alaoma Village
In Alaoma Village, people used to say the land remembers everything, even what leaders try to forget.
Life moved in routines that were familiar but no longer fully trusted. Children still went to the village school near the old mango tree, where the bell sounded like both warning and habit.
Traders still opened their stalls at the central market, though conversations had become shorter over time. People no longer spoke freely on the road that led out of Alaina Village.
One evening, travellers going toward the border road did not return. At first, the village treated it like one of those stories that happens to “other places.”
But the next morning, someone said quietly at the stream, “It happened on our road this time.” Nobody replied immediately.
A man loading yams into his cart only said, “That road again.” A woman washing plates at the river answered, “It is always that road, and nothing changes.”
A young boy looked up and asked, “Why don’t they stop it?”
His mother paused. “They are supposed to stop it.”
“Who are they?”
She hesitated. “The ones who sit under the tree and speak for all of us.”
The boy did not ask again, but that question stayed with him in a different way after that day.
The village head of Alaoma Village sat under the big council tree with his elders when the matter was brought again.
People spoke over each other this time. “This is not small anymore.”
“People are disappearing.”
“We cannot keep calling meetings.”
The village head leaned back and said, “Do you think we are not aware?”
A man stepped forward. “Awareness is not protection.”
Silence followed that sentence. It was not the first silence in Alaoma Village, but it was the kind that stayed longer than usual.
Days passed. Then weeks. The road did not change. People changed instead. They stopped travelling alone. Then they stopped travelling at certain hours. Then they stopped speaking about the road unless necessary.
Fear did not announce itself. It simply reorganised daily life.
A mother named Ugochi now walked her son halfway to the village school every morning. One day, the boy asked again, “If they know, why is it still happening?”
Ugochi adjusted his school bag strap and said softly, “Sometimes knowing is not the same as doing.”
“Then what do we do?”
She did not answer quickly.
Because in Alaoma Village, answers had started taking longer than danger. That week, another group went missing on the same road.
That was when the village stopped waiting politely. People gathered at the council tree again. An elder spoke, tired this time:
“If this continues, there will be no road left to use.”
A woman replied, “There is already no safety left to trust.”
The village head said, “Do you think I sleep peacefully with all this?”
A man answered, “We are not here to talk about sleep. We are here to talk about survival.”
Silence returned again, but this time it was different. It was not acceptance. It was exhaustion.
That night, young men from Alaoma Village gathered near the edge of the road. “We cannot keep leaving this to them,” one of them said.
Another replied, “We have been leaving it since it started.”
“So what now?”
No one had a perfect answer. But they agreed on one thing, they would no longer move alone, and they would no longer assume someone else was coming to fix it.
It did not end the danger. But it changed something inside Alaoma Village. People began to move together. Speak more openly. Watch more carefully.
And slowly, they realised something that had been forming quietly all along: when leadership delays too long, the village stops looking upward for rescue and begins looking inward for survival.
Under the big tree in Alaoma Village where promises used to gather, nothing physically changed. But the belief that things would change from there, that one had already begun to fade.
MORAL:
When protection is delayed, communities stop waiting and begin to create their own survival systems.
ENGAGEMENT HOOK:
If a village can no longer rely on those who sit under the tree, where should safety begin instead, in leadership, or in the people themselves?
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