How colonial trauma still shapes our scandals today and its costs

We live in tumultuous and treacherous times. A time when big names are linked to the most horrifying scandals, as seen in the Epstein files. A time when, closer home, videos are emerging online of people lured into all kinds of traps, including one where a foreigner allegedly recorded his prey from the time he approached them to the time they visited his den.

I have also been wrestling with the devil, to borrow an image from Ngugi wa Thiong’o (GBHS), and all I can tell you for now is that be careful who you give your phone number or your handset ostensibly to make a call.

That said, this season of revelations, karmic traps and scandals, in my view, reveals our hypocrisy as a people. We simply don’t say who we are. Beneath the veneer of our common civility often lies the vilest of creatures of the night

From a psychoanalytic perspective, it is not inconceivable that the hate, the hypocrisy and the evil schemes we project against others is a mirror of our own trauma, our own hearts of darkness and self-hatred.

So, when it takes only hours for a foreigner to lure dozens into his lair, you see all sorts of analyses online. Some argue that Kenyans are not “romantic”, they are “stingy”, and other assertions that do not belong in these pages.

My own sense is that we have never left the world of Song of Lawino by Okot p’Bitek. On the surface, Lawino’s nemesis, Clementina, is a woman who hates the fact that she is black and bleaches her skin to achieve a lighter complexion.

A deeper analysis would, however, reveal a history of trauma where, after being brutalised by four hundred years of slavery based on skin colour, followed by a century of colonial brutality and oppression, people often resort to two kinds of reactions.

The first lot protests against oppression, as happened with the struggle for freedom across most of Africa from the 1940s through the 1960s. The second lot opts for escape.

This explains why, as some braved the cold in the forests to fight for the land, some in their midst had already cast their lots with the other side.

So, they saw themselves not as part of the oppressed, but as a privileged few who were spared much of the brutality of the colonial gulags, so much that they saw themselves as part of the colonial authorities.

Whenever I interview elders for biography projects, I sense how early colonial schooling conditioned some Africans to see themselves as “civilised” and closer to Europe than their own people.

This cultural Stockholm syndrome helps explain how a foreigner can exploit buried prejudices — and within hours lure even the hard-to-get into a trap. You see this kind of traumatic escapism in some of the finest works to have ever come out of Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, during the aftermath of the colonial struggle. You see it in Peter Abrahams’s Mine Boy, which tells the story of Zuma, a young man from the north who comes to Johannesburg, South Africa, to look for a job.

Zuma settles in Malay Camp, a sprawling slum where illicit drinks rule the nights and men sweat out their days in gold mines. Zuma soon meets Eliza, a better-educated girl who however wants to be with a white man. Zuma keeps chasing Eliza, and ignores another girl, Maisy, who loves him deeply.

Reading the novel, you come away feeling that apartheid did not only oppress blacks in South Africa.

It alienated them from themselves, leaving them in endless pursuit of another version of themselves that existed in the world of their oppressors. It is why, I guess, Abrahams named the book ‘Mine Boy’ and not ‘Mine Man’. For there was practically no difference between a young boy and a grown man in the eyes of the apartheid system.

It, therefore, follows that any woman looking for a man could be forgiven, at least psychologically, for not looking among those who had been predestined to be ‘boys’ for eternity.

Closer to Europe

So, while the world may today not be literally under official colonial or apartheid systems, we are still yet to heal from the shadows that these systems created in our minds. For instance, in my school days, the school captain thought of himself – they were mostly boys – as closer to the teachers than to fellow learners.

So, the school captain was even allowed to use the cane. This, no doubt, stemmed from a system where those who had gone to school during the colonial era saw themselves as closer to Europe than to pre-colonial Africa.

If in doubt, watch how many treat gardeners and househelps. In a typical Nairobi home in 2026, warmth flows freely among family members — but turns harsh and patronising when directed at the nanny.

It all stems from the world of Toundi, that young man in Sembene Ousmane’s novel, House Boy, who insults his father and keeps hopping from one white family to the next, perhaps looking for acceptance outside his own traumatised reality.

Toundi lives in a world where you are doomed on account of where you were born. For him, accepting his reality would mean being condemned forever to a dog’s life.

On the other hand, trying to escape from his reality by imagining himself as the ‘other’ leads to the same realisation that everyone else is taken.

We have largely remained in a time warp where this kind of trauma is concerned.

We treat each other unkindly not necessarily because we loathe each other, but because we have been socialised to believe that moving a rung higher on the food chain makes you different from those on the lower rungs.

We are yet to heal from the traumas piled high into our cultural psyche over the past four centuries, in my view. We need to heal from these validation-seeking mental loops that make us hopelessly susceptible to abuse.