Trigger warning: This content discusses the trauma of colonization. It includes descriptions of slavery and oppression, which may be distressing, especially for enslaved African descendants. Viewer discretion is advised.

While my parents had many pictures of our family in Congo, I discovered my ancestral land in the thirties comic book Tintin in the Congo. I browsed it in the nursery school’s library when I was five. Turning the pages, I found out the Congolese were ugly, stupid charcoal-black savages with oversized red lips. The other kids laughed at me. They taunted me, saying that those grotesque characters represented me.

Sometimes, schoolmates called me “Blackie,” like the name of a depressed black cow in the children’s cartoon “La Noiraude.” Other times, they called me “Bamboula,” like the African “savage” in a chocolate cookies commercial. So, I called them “whitey” or “crackers,” as Mama taught me to answer.

Yet, I didn’t know what to reply when I faced the entire room mocking Tintin’s Congolese subordinates. A famous grown-up designed those ignorant characters. It wasn’t my schoolmates’ words but those of an adult comic writer. In my five-year-old mind, two things held the truth: adults and books. So, I froze in front of my new, overpowering opponent. Overwhelmed by the unfair fight, I felt the immense weight of my ignorance on my sobbing tiny chest.

I recounted the encounter to Mommy, soaked in my incessant tears in her soft arms. She stressed those ridiculous people in Tintin’s comic weren’t Congolese. I refused to believe her. The author wrote it in black and white: it was Congo. I wiped, “This is us! It’s what the world thinks of us. Nobody cares about what you say, Mama!”

Sighing, Mama continued to stroke my soft, coiled black hair done in tiny braids. While she tightened the braid knots with my favorite pink and white pearly beads, she dropped another secret only my parents held. Tintin wasn’t in our Congo, she reassured me. The French and the Belgians took over our ancestors’ Kingdom of Kongo and made two countries out of it. “Tintin visited the other Congo. It’s called Zaire now,” she said. I thought that was the precise knowledge I wanted. I needed it before to thwart my schoolmates’ mockery, not after the drama. I could have explained them. I needed to know more. My defenseless tears flow dwindled.

My trembling voice asked why France, my country, and Belgium, its friendly neighbor, had invaded Congo. Mama answered, “Because they thought they had the right to do so. But the two Congos are independent now.” A dark web overtook my young mind. It sounded so unreal that countries that loved freedom captured others, even if Mama reassured me it happened long ago when she was a child.

Mommy talked about the independence war in Congo. She went to school, anyway, walking through the bullets. She said, “I was not afraid. It felt like a game. It’s like life, honey. You need to dodge bullets head in pride because you will receive many of them because of your skin color. If you cry only for a comic book now, you will never stop sobbing.”

A last tear dropped from my searching eyes. I stood up from Mama’s lap. “It’s not fair,” I said.

Mommy replied, “I know. All the children with dark skin experienced that, and this is what it is.”

So, like the other kids of African origins, the Blacks, as the European descendants called us, I silenced my tears. My teardrops didn’t matter more than my fellows: we, African children, were all together in this sad confusion.

Indeed, most pictures French children had of Africa were of the wilderness, as depicted in National Geographic and its French equivalent, GEO. Besides, the news narrated the continent as a lazy, backward “country” still needing “European mastery,” like in Tintin in the Congo.

When I was three, I asked Mommy why people in French movies weren’t like us. She replied, “Because we are immigrants. The French do not include us because it’s their television.”

Still, we were also French citizens and living in France. So why didn’t the reality on the screen look like reality? “Television is not reality. That’s why you must not believe it,” Mama replied. When I insisted it wasn’t fair, she answered with my most hated sentence, closing the conversation, “I know, but it is as it is.”

I felt so confused about reality that I hallucinated the following night. I saw shadows in the dark walking around my parent’s bed, where I’d found refuge. Minding their business, they ignored my presence as if they lived in a parallel world where I could see them while they didn’t see me. As I cried out, Mommy switched on the light, and they disappeared. She comforted me, reassuring me there was no one in the bedroom. Yet, as soon as she switched off the light, I saw the shadows again and screamed. It continued several times until Mama asked me to close my eyes and sleep.

That terrifying hallucination was so vivid that I still remember it today. Since that traumatic event, I hate leaving people behind. I’m afraid I’ll become a shadow of myself if I exclude and ignore people when I design new realities.

In the 1980s, French inclusion wasn’t a French media executives’ concern. They considered African Americans representative of French TV diversity and still broadcast 19th-century Minstrel shows. My three-year-old mind didn’t understand why my parents changed the channel when I saw this show for the first time: the European Americans wore blackface for fun. Mama said, “Because those people mock us. It’s only funny for those with tiny minds who do not see they lower themselves.”

The rare positive portrayals on French TV were the famous South African “Shaka Zulu” and the American “Roots” series. Hence, with limited cultural representation, my older sister, Kéti, and younger brother, Eric, and I created games with what we had. We loved role-playing our African heroes.

Mama said “Zulu” means “sky” in Zulu and Kikongo, our ancestors’ language, because the two peoples shared the same soul. The Bakongo were the “Banya na Zulu,” the children of the sky. “Zulu people are like our family,” she said. So, sometimes, we fought with imaginary spears and shields like ruthless King Shaka did in series credits. Chanting Zulu warriors’ powerful songs, our siblinghood joined forces to overpower an imaginary enemy to death. Daddy didn’t like us to role-play because of the bloodthirsty ruler’s infamous brutality.

The notorious South African ruler revolutionized Warcraft in Africa, and his technique threatened the almighty British colonial empire. Our parents said his fierce reputation echoed across the continent. Thus, my siblings and I thought the Zulus were the strongest and bravest fighters on the planet.

Other times, our siblinghood played Roots’ Kunta Kinte during transatlantic slavery long before France took over Congo. We whipped each other with a black leather belt. We tried to hold onto our memories of Jufferee, Kunta’s native village in Gambia, and his people, the Mandinka Kunte clan. Standing tall and proud like the courageous young enslaved West African, we imitated his determination against adversity. We braved the British enslavers’ cruelty who tried to break the stolen Mandinka’s strong will. We howled Kunta Kinte’s name at each hit until the unbearable pain on our little backs gave away the name our hero’s bloodthirsty captor forced on him: Toby. And like him, we became American.

Dad walked in on us once. When we explained we played “Roots,” he took our belt-turned-whip away from Eric’s tiny hands and asked us to play another game. “Why?” my then four-year-old sibling asked with innocent big brown eyes. A sheer ocean covered Daddy’s bewildered gaze. He left in silence and never interrupted us again.

A post-script for my scientist peers:

Colonial trauma passes from one generation to another by continuing to misrepresent the realities that European cultures colonized, meaning most of humanity. It persists when mental healthcare professionals cannot help. It continues when their perception is as uniform as that of 19th-century scientists. It lingers in the 21st century when today’s Western professionals aren’t systemically educated to deal with most humankind. It might stay forever if we believe Western science is objective, universal, and reliable, and overlook that diversity and inclusion are science’s progress. It might make us irrelevant when we forget the oath we made when we chose to heal humanity: first, do no harm. No one trusts someone who breaks their promises.

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