Imagine living in a continent where everything about you is seen as inherently ugly, primitive, uncivilised and savage.  Imagine being seen as backward, dirty, poor, and diseased.  Imagine not being mentioned in the news in any other context other than war, famine, chaos, disaster, and corruption.  Imagine being the object of scorn, pity, disgust, and revulsion.  Imagine being looked at as less deserving, less competent, less qualified, and less intelligent.  Imagine being seen as corrupt, dishonest, untrustworthy, and suspect before you even utter a word. Imagine being seen as inferior, sub-human, and maybe even an animal.  That is the reality of being an African today.  It’s a wound we carry with us every second of every day, from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep.

Somehow, the world conveniently forgot all the crimes that were committed against Africans and blamed us for our suffering and trauma.  The fact that we cannot get it together, mere decades after the trauma of slavery and colonialism, is used as evidence of our inferiority.  Colonialism, slavery and the hidden structures of neo-colonialism are never mentioned as a valid explanation for why we remain poor and in constant chaos.  The same people who colonised us give us lectures on good governance and democracy.  The perpetrators are now our saviours.  They are the heroes, and we are the beggars. 

Our History Erased

Africa is a continent without a history.  We started existing when colonialists came.  Before that, there was nothing.  No trade.  No education.  No governance.  No civilisation.  No knowledge.  Nothing worth mentioning in history books.  At least, that is what the world wants us to believe.  We were a bunch of cavemen, running around with clubs before the white man came to civilise us.  We have always been and will always be slaves and good only for extraction.

And yet, we keep getting fragments of a history forgotten, whispers in the wind that we are more than the world would like to admit.  There was once a library of Alexandria – an unparalleled wealth of knowledge and information that was burnt down by the Romans.  Queen Cleopatra, one of the wealthiest people on the planet during her time, scared the Romans so much that they chose to destroy her rather than admit that a woman was about to outwit them in their own game.  The Queen of Sheba presided over a queendom that spanned the Horn of Africa, her lineage ruling over Ethiopia uninterrupted for millennia.  Mansa Musa, a West African King, was so wealthy, he is still considered today the wealthiest man who ever lived.  Long-forgotten Kingdoms speak of a people with strong governance structures that needed no lectures on governance from anyone.  Trade routes and currency existed long before the colonialists came to build infrastructure that was meant for extraction.

The truth is, we had a history which was buried because the best way to psychologically destroy someone and get them to submit is to tell them they are nothing and have always been nothing. 

Our Spirituality Destroyed

Before the cruel and vengeful gods were introduced to us, we had our own loving gods who protected us, provided for us and cared what happened to us.  We had places of worship in forests, on sacred hills and groves, and in the mountains.  We prayed to these gods when we needed rain, and we thanked them when children were born and harvests were bountiful.  We had a priesthood that told us what the gods wanted, and we trusted them with a childlike innocence.  God was like a parent who cared for his children and provided for all their needs through nature.

We were told this was primitive.  The true God is angry, cruel, and vengeful.  If you disobey him, he will send you to hell to burn for eternity.  The true God has a chosen people to whom he shows his love through war, death, and a murderous rage.  The true God wants you to be humble, submit to slavery and colonialism, and respect authority even when authority abuses you.  He wants you to ask nothing of life because you will have true happiness once you join him in heaven, where you will spend eternity singing his praises.

Our Culture Dismantled

We had ways of doing things.  Marriage rites, birth rites, initiation rites, planting rites, harvest rites.  We had kings and queens, chiefs, and councils of elders.  We had ways of relating to each other that made sense to us.  We took care of the environment because all our needs were met through nature.  Everything was in abundance, and there was no need to own or hoard.  One seed produced a hundred-fold.  One animal reproduced in due season, providing the meat, milk, eggs and skins we needed for life.  When a couple got married, the community built them a house.  There was no need for thirty-year mortgages to pay for the roof over your head.  There was no need for anyone to slave away for a corporation to survive.  We had a way of doing things that was not perfect, but was in harmony with nature.

All this was set aside for a civilisation that drains your life-force, just for the privilege of existing.  The civilisation that replaced our primitive cultures thrives in brutality and predation.  The weak are crushed by the strong, and no one blinks.  Progress is measured by steel structures, not the ability to care and provide for the citizens.  Systemic failure is blamed on the individual.  Education systems prepare people to submit to authority and never question what the leaders are doing.  War and aggression are the norm, and humans are nothing more than workers, serving the system.  Maybe we should start by defining what civilisation means, because I don’t see anything civilised about how the world works today.

Our Bodies Seen as Inherently Ugly

We look in the mirror, and a black face stares back at us.  This is not the image of beauty the world recognises.  The world sees beauty as white, straight-haired, and colourful eyed.  It’s in every movie you watch and every magazine you flip through.  It’s in social media, in the curated images and videos we are fed.  It’s in the news and in reality shows.  It’s in the billboards we stare at and the mannequins in shops.  It’s the Barbie dolls our children play with and the cartoons they watch.  No one needs to tell you what beauty looks like.  They just need to show you.  Over and over and over again, until you get it.

Black bodies are all wrong.  Butts are too big.  Hips too wide.  Noses too flat.  Protruding lips.  Bad skin.  Everyone knows that black is bad.  Black sheep.  Black market.  Black magic.  God must have been confused when he created us, or maybe he didn’t get the memo.  Our kinky hair is all wrong and is supposed to be hidden in wigs, weaves, braids or plaited lines.  It is unpresentable in its natural form, untidy, and unprofessional.  No African mother ever sat her daughter down and told her that her hair was unacceptable.  But every girl knows it.  Even the youngest girls are subjected to scorching blow-dryers by loving mothers, whose own mothers used an infinitely worse method of straightening hair known as the hot comb.  Alternatively, the hair can be cooked in a painful, torturous process that most black women know only too well.  This is done using chemicals that burn and scar if left on too long, which they invariably are.  The process has to be repeated regularly as the natural kinky hair seeks to reestablish itself, a phenomenon derisively known as ‘growth’.  Hairdressers regularly berate women for appearing at the salon with unacceptable levels of ‘growth’, a sure sign of neglect.  Never mind the fact that straightening hair costs money, which we don’t always have.  In fact, the process of making African hair presentable costs a lot of money.  It damages hair and messes up hairlines.  But we seem to agree that it is worth it.

Who decided on this standard of beauty?  We don’t know for sure, but everyone has submitted to it.  That is why there is a thriving market for human hair, targeted at the black woman.  You don’t have to endure the shame of your natural kinky hair when you can hide it under the straight hair of some Asian woman.  That is why there is a thriving market for skin lighteners that promise transformative whiteness, but instead destroy your skin gradually.  Black women consider this a worthwhile price to pay for that momentary glimpse of what it feels like to be light-skinned, if not white.  The world does everything in its power to help black people solve the blackness problem.

How this Impacts Us

If someone were to study the psychology of Africans, I wonder what they would find.  I suspect it would be self-loathing.  Feelings of worthlessness.  Anxiety.  Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).  Depression.  Anger.  Confusion.  Stockholm syndrome.  Internalised inferiority.  All stemming from the trauma of violence, forced displacement, and systemic oppression experienced during colonialism, slavery and neo-colonialism. The psychological impact is not limited to those who directly endured the trauma; it extends across generations through intergenerational trauma.

Because we are traumatised, we continue recreating the same brutal structures that abused us, no different from someone who was abused in childhood, ending up in a cycle of abusive relationships.  We were taught to hate ourselves and see ourselves as unworthy, which is why we continue choosing leaders who abuse us, long after the colonialists left.

We blame ourselves for the fact that we are underdeveloped, echoing what the dominant societies tell us.  We are corrupt.  We are incompetent.  We are the cause of our own misery.  We need help.  We are less intelligent.  We have nothing of value.  We will never develop.

Because of our Stockholm syndrome, we look to our abusers to save us.  We believe what they tell us about ourselves.  We copy them.  We cooperate with them in our own destruction.  We continue inviting them into our countries, even when they disrespect us and despise us.  We allow humanitarian workers to come gawk at our suffering, then return to their homes to international acclaim and medals for the work they do that never seems to accomplish anything. We are trapped in trauma bonds that keep us open to our abusers to continue abusing us.  We have zero defence mechanisms for keeping abusers at bay.

Our internalised inferiority means that we despise our accomplishments and see them as nothing.  We continue looking to others to tell us what to do, rather than coming up with our own simple solutions that can be refined over time.  We accept without question other people’s agendas even when they don’t benefit us.  We allow others to extract our wealth and leave us with nothing.

Healing our Wounds

If Africa were a person and went for therapy, the therapist would probably point out how our lack of self-love and self-worth is causing us to repeat the same patterns of trauma that are so familiar to us.  They would point out that our leaders today treat us with the same lack of empathy our colonisers did.  They would point out that we have no boundaries.

The first step in healing is to admit that we are wounded.  Just because the colonisers left does not mean that we immediately went back to normal.  Once we admit that we are wounded, we must start the long walk back to wholeness by talking about what happened to us and recognising how it affects how we behave today.  We need to grieve for what was done to us and what was taken away from us.  We need to grieve for having lived through the disdain and lack of empathy the world treats us with. 

Then we must start loving ourselves.  Loving ourselves means choosing leaders who treat us with love and empathy.  It means choosing leaders who are gentle and kind towards us.  It means leaning more towards the feminine energy that has been suppressed, but which we need to heal.  It means choosing female leaders to balance out the masculine, aggressive leadership we are currently experiencing.  It means keeping out anything and anyone that does not serve us.  From people who come to extract from us, to humanitarian aid that we don’t need and does not help us.  It means knowing who our friends are and who our enemies are.  Not everyone who smiles at us is a friend.  We must ask for reparations, apologies, restitution and dismantling of colonial-era structures that still hold us back today.  We must demand an end to neo-colonialism, interventions, and debt slavery.