There are times when a poem arrives like a visitation — not simply as art, but as revelation. Oumar Farouk Sesay’s We Who Vowed: Shame on Us is such a work. It is the lament and indictment of a generation that once stood up to tyranny, dreamt of liberation, and now wakes to the bitter truth of what it has become.
Farouk’s poem opens with a quotation from Sierra Leone’s distinguished poet Syl Cheney-Coker — “Africa beware! Their patience is running out!” — from The Peasant. It is both invocation and indictment. Cheney-Coker wrote as a prophet warning the post-colonial state that the patience of the dispossessed would not endure forever. Sesay, in turn, writes as witness and confessor — one of those who once resisted the oppressor’s boots, now grappling with the unbearable truth that his own generation has become the very thing it once opposed.
When I read this poem, I could not help but remember those days at Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone, where I first met Farouk. It was the 1980s, and the one-party rule of the All People’s Congress (APC) had sealed much of the nation in silence. In those years, the voices of students were among the few still daring to speak truth to power. The cry of “A luta continua” was not a mere slogan; it was the pulse of a young nation’s conscience, echoing across Africa amid the resistance to Apartheid South Africa.
We believed, with the fiery sincerity of youth, that when our time came, we would build something nobler. We carried placards and ideals, marched with faith, read Agostinho Neto, Paulo Freire, and Cheney-Coker as scripture. We thought ourselves midwives of a new dawn.
And so when Sesay begins, “It is now our turn,” the words bristle with irony and tragedy. That phrase — “it is now our turn” — is a double-edged blade. On one side, it marks the long-awaited ascension of the oppressed to power: the fulfilment of those student dreams, the rotation of history’s wheel. On the other, it carries the darkly familiar refrain of many African transitions — “it is our turn to eat.” In that subtle turn of phrase lies the poem’s genius. For it is not only about political succession but about moral inheritance: the way in which each new ruling class, in country after country, repeats the sins of its predecessors, feeding on the very people they vowed to liberate.
The poem’s moral arc unfolds with the quiet inevitability of tragedy. “We who once crawled beneath the boots of power,” the poet writes, “who choked beneath the knee of tyranny…” The rhythm recalls old songs of resistance but quickly curdles into remorse. For the poet’s “we” is inclusive — it spares no one, not even the dreamers. The abused have become the abusers. The once-oppressed, their own oppressors.
Then comes the stanza that sears itself into memory:
> “We have poisoned the rivers — seven of them,
their waters seeking judgment in the Atlantic.”
It is an image both local and universal. Sierra Leone’s seven great rivers — Rokel, Jong, Sewa, Moa, Mano, Great Scarcies, and Little Scarcies — once carried life and sustenance across a land of radiant beauty. Today, many of them flow sluggish, poisoned by mercury and cyanide from reckless mining. In their sickness lies an allegory for the entire postcolonial condition: a once-living body, defiled by greed. The ecological tragedy becomes moral metaphor — for a people who, having inherited freedom, have squandered it on the altar of consumption.
Here, Sesay’s craft reveals its mastery. His language is unadorned yet resonant, the syntax simple but heavy with meaning. He writes with the quiet authority of one who has lived through the cycles he condemns. The poem’s structure is incantatory — each repetition of “we who” building not hope, but lamentation. The effect is almost liturgical: a confession before the altar of history.
By the time we reach the poem’s midpoint, the grand ideals of liberation have decayed into grotesque caricature:
> “Our flags are stained with betrayal,
our anthems taste of ash.”
The future, he tells us, “wears the face of our past, walking toward us with a smile we once feared.” It is a devastating insight — that what we call progress may simply be a circular return to old evils, wearing a different face.
Yet the poem never descends into nihilism. Beneath its fury lies an aching tenderness — the sorrow of one who expected better from his own kind. There is no moral distance between poet and subject. The “we” of We Who Vowed is not accusatory but collective; it acknowledges complicity, not superiority. This, perhaps, is what lifts the poem above mere protest literature into the realm of moral art.
In the final stanzas, Sesay’s voice becomes elegiac:
> “We who vowed to heal the realm,
look what we have done.
Shame on us.”
It is not just a condemnation; it is a plea for redemption — the poet’s way of saying that confession is the first act of recovery.
Reading We Who Vowed today, one cannot help but think of other African nations caught in similar cycles — of revolutions betrayed, of governments born from resistance turning into replicas of the tyrannies they overthrew. From Harare to Conakry, from Accra to Nairobi, the story repeats: hope rises, power corrupts, and another generation inherits disillusionment.
Farouk’s poem, however, refuses despair. Its power lies in its truth-telling — in its willingness to hold a mirror to the faces of those who once saw themselves as saviours. That mirror may reflect Sierra Leone, but its reflection stretches far beyond.
To read We Who Vowed is to confront not only the failures of politics but the erosion of the soul — the slow unravelling of moral purpose in a continent that has known too much betrayal. And yet, in that act of confrontation lies a seed of renewal. For poetry, at its most potent, does not merely condemn; it cleanses.
Oumar Farouk Sesay may not fully know it, but he has become something of a vessel — a medium through which thoughts beyond our ordinary grasp flow. In We Who Vowed: Shame on Us, he channels the anguish of a people who once believed in dawn and now grope through a perpetual dusk. He gives their silence a voice, their disillusion a language, and, in doing so, offers a path toward awakening.
In the end, this is not merely a poem about Sierra Leone. It is a poem about us — all of us — who, in one way or another, have betrayed the better angels of our own revolutions. And so when the poet says, “Shame on us,” he speaks not from bitterness, but from a love deep enough to still care, still mourn, still hope.
That, perhaps, is the truest measure of great poetry: that it leaves us not only wounded, but wiser.
A turning point of pointers for the pointed.