I thought I was going to write about the inner turmoils of marriage. But the words took me somewhere else — somewhere deeper. They took me back to where I come from.
I was born in a South African township. This means my “normal” path in life was set from the start: go to school, get a job, marry, and raise children. If that path helped me leave the township, I would have been seen as a success.
But that definition of success was never ours. Townships were never designed for dignity. They were designed for labour. For black people to serve white interests. For black families to be broken by work, absence, and exhaustion.
Our parents left before sunrise to work for white families. They returned after dark. Some didn’t even get to raise their own children. This created generations of children raised in emotional famine — with trauma shaped by neglect and abandonment. This is not metaphor. This is history. This is my story. This is many people’s story.
When you abandon your own children to survive, you also abandon yourself. And people who have abandoned themselves cannot love themselves. So they chase numbness. Enter addiction — sex, porn, sugar, alcohol, drugs, work, phones. Township life is addicted life. Because it is a survival life. And the alcohol that floods our townships? Still benefits the same systems that built them.
Apartheid was never just a policy — it was a spiritual crime. It separated us from our land, and by doing that, it separated us from our culture, language, and soul. We were not just removed from space — we were removed from self.
Today, most black South Africans are still operating from that separation. They are addicted versions of who they could be. When two such people form a marriage, they don’t even realise that they’re trauma-bonded. That they’re acting out slavery within the home. That they were never free to choose a partner — they were programmed to survive with someone.
But sometimes, one partner wakes up. Truth knocks. And when it enters a trauma-bonded home, it shakes everything. It breaks illusions. It crumbles the house built on survival mode.
Let me explain it simply: in the township, most people are in survival mode. Victim mode. In this mode, you are not dreaming, creating, or loving. You are coping. And two victims cannot build a future. They cannot build a home of abundance. Unless someone wakes up and breaks the cycle.
This is Newton’s First Law. A marriage will remain stuck in unconscious motion unless an external force — awareness — disrupts it.
Many black marriages are built on the lies of apartheid — and the religion that justified it. Let’s not pretend Christianity wasn’t used to make good slaves. To tell us suffering is holy. To make us believe heaven is after death, not here.
Today, black political leadership in South Africa continues the cycle. The ANC, operating under white capital, has not prioritised land, healing, or real empowerment. Instead, they’ve polished the chains. The township remains. People defend it. Some have even forgotten it was a tool of oppression. This is the collective unconscious at work.
Now add AI. Add smartphones. Add parents who were already addicted — now giving screens to their children at age two. This is a new trauma. Digital abandonment. Emotional starvation in HD.
Black families are raising children who are unlikely to survive the coming AI era. Why? Because the key skill is attention — and they’re not being taught how to hold it.
And if children lose attention, they lose direction.
When two township people get married, they often do so in tight spaces — physical and emotional. But marriage, by design, should be a union of equals, carrying life’s load together. A marriage should be about building a small nation. But if it’s built on trauma, addiction, and inherited lies — that nation is weak.
There is no nation-building in survival mode. There is no nation-building without land. There is no love without self. And there is no future without attention.
We need to wake up. We need to remember. We need to return.
Sankofa