This essay charts the changing logic of subaltern political advocacy from colonial to post-colonial Uganda. The lost counties were a vast territory that the British had carved out of the conquered kingdom of Bunyoro and awarded to the kingdom of Buganda, their premier ally, in the late nineteenth century. In colonial Uganda, Nyoro activists utilized the historical grammar of abolitionism to oblige British rulers to act on their behalf. They engaged in the work of cultural revival, animated practices that made them politically and culturally distinctive. With the ethnographic evidence at hand they prodded the British emancipate them from the shackles of Ganda tyranny. In the 1960s, after Uganda’s independence, subaltern abolitionists lost their British audience. What had formerly been a campaign for cultural restitution became a machine for the generation of violence. As evidence, violence helped Nyoro litigants create legal proofs of the iniquities of Ganda governance in the lost counties. As an act of classification, violence helped organize people into constituencies, establish a majority in a particular tract of territory, and generate hard numbers that could be counted in censuses and elections.