You know, sometimes I lie awake imagining what it must feel like to carry centuries in your bones. To wake up in the morning, drag your feet to the mirror and see a face that holds echoes of trauma, pride, resilience, and questions. What does it mean, post slavery, to be black in Africa and beyond when the weight of history still presses your ribs?

Let me say this clearly, we are not our pain but the pain shaped us. The brutality of slavery, the dehumanization, the tearing apart of families, the forced forgetting , those are not dusty chapters in a textbook. They are live wires that run through psyches, social systems, identity and memory.

The thing about slavery and colonialism is they didn’t just stop and say, “Ok my bad, let us all move on.” No! They left receipts. Psychological ones  Black men especially, got handed a manual of masculinity that was half toxic, half stolen and fully confusing. You’re supposed to be strong, stoic and dominant but also the world sees you as dangerous, lazy or hypersexualized. Can they perhaps pick a struggle.

And let’s talk about  Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome (PTSS), coined by Joy DeGruy. It’s the idea that centuries of slavery trauma still shape behaviors and self image today. It’s controversial but honestly, have you seen how many of us still feel like foreign is equivalent to better? That’s colonial trauma in HD. People bleaching their skin, switching to British accents when they answer calls or flexing European brands like their lives depend on it just because the quality in Africa could apparently never. To me that’s more or less the mind chains.

And what about the  children? Gen Z and Gen Alpha, the ones who can edit TikToks faster than I can boil an egg. Are they even being taught the raw intensity of colonial atrocities? Sometimes yes, but often schools package it like “Oh yes, there was some unpleasantness, anyway here’s a fun fact about Vasco da Gama ” Meanwhile the real history was straight  up The Conjuring horror movie . The forced labor, land theft, cultural erasure. UNESCO even had to create a guide on teaching colonial violence and atrocious crimes in Africa because teachers weren’t sure how to handle it without traumatizing kids. How about we start with honesty? Because when you don’t teach it, the younger generation ends up confused. They inherit this weird mix of pride and cringe. They know Wakanda forever but not what happened in Congo under Leopold II. They can vibe to Burna Boy, but may not know how their parents were literally banned from speaking their language in school. So what happens when you don’t know the depth of your history? You get identity theft. You inherit a worldview where foreign is better, local is crude. You end up internalizing a kind of cultural cringe. That’s colonial trauma in fashion.

But let me not depress you because here’s the wild thing,  black people are still thriving. Resilience is the family heirloom nobody can take. Despite centuries of systemic sabotage, black communities created jazz, hip hop, Nollywood, Pan African movements and memes that slap harder than colonialism ever could. There’s a reason psychologists studying slavery‘s aftermath also talk about strength from scars. 

So will black people ever be free? Depends on what you mean by free. No chains? Done. Economic justice? Still pending. True psychological liberation where no one feels less than because of skin or history? It requires decolonizing education, teaching children the truth, healing generational trauma, and maybe unfollowing all those Instagram influencers pushing European standards of beauty/ Eurocentric Features. Personally? I think freedom isn’t this one day we’ll arrive moment. It’s a vibe we cultivate daily  in classrooms, in therapy, in memes, in cultural pride, in saying “no, I don’t need to bleach to be beautiful.” Freedom is refusing to let history’s worst chapters be the only story.

So whether you’re twenty, fifty, or fifteen know that your foremothers and forefathers survived when systems wanted them dead. They told stories, sang songs, held memory when everything else was stripped. That legacy is your birthright. Our job now is to speak louder, to carry the unspoken, to teach the unknown. To let the young ones hold both anger and hope, trauma and pride, history and possibility. Because freedom isn’t a finish line, it’s a horizon. And I’ll walk toward it, with you, every single day.