06/09/2025
Caution long post,but worth reading
The Silent Scream: A Psychoanalytic Reflection on A.T.I, Generational Trauma, and the African Family. - Prince Kamaazengi Marenga I, Pan African Poet/Author/ Intercultural Practitioner, Bremen, Germany.
When a nation mourns an artist, we often remember the music, the charisma, the public persona. But when the artist’s pain becomes unbearable, when the torment overflows into substance abuse and ultimately death, we are forced to look beyond the stage lights into the abyss that birthed the art. The recent passing of A.T.I, one of Botswana’s most talented musicians, is not just a tragedy for music lovers. It is a mirror held up to the soul of African societies and the unspoken burdens we ask our children to carry.
In a post from 2021, A.T.I left us with a cryptic but searing meditation on his life. He spoke of a “perfect family” that was anything but perfect, of a child forced to apologize for existing, of a mother whose unhealed wounds shaped his entire sense of self. He hinted at in**st, control, generational perversion, themes that many of us would rather not confront. It was the kind of testimony that psychoanalysis is made for.
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, would have seen in A.T.I’s words the primal family drama. The child torn between love and resentment, craving recognition from a parent who withholds it, unconsciously reenacting the parent’s traumas. Freud argued that neurosis often stems from repressed desires and traumas within the family structure. Here, we witness not just repression but an entire identity molded in the image of maternal disappointment.
Frantz Fanon, writing from the context of colonized societies, would push this analysis further. He would remind us that the family is never just a private affair in colonized nations. It is shaped by history, by oppression, by the psychic residues of slavery and colonial domination. The “perfect home” that A.T.I describes is one that may have been performing respectability for a society still haunted by colonial categories of morality, religion, and success. Fanon warned that colonialism creates fractured psyches, where the colonized internalize the oppressor’s gaze and turn it against themselves, and often against their own children.
What A.T.I describes, ( and what many talented but troubled African youth experience), is the unbearable collision of these forces. The mother, herself a survivor of historical and personal traumas, becomes both caretaker and jailer. The child becomes a vessel of redemption and, at the same time, a reminder of her failures. The result is a relationship that oscillates between love and control, between nurturing and psychic cannibalism.
When A.T.I writes, “Growing from being 8 years old at 30 years old,” we hear the voice of someone whose emotional development was arrested by constant psychic interference. Drugs, in such a case, are not simply recreational, they are anesthetics; temporary ways to escape a reality too tightly woven by parental control and unhealed pain.
This is not just one man’s story. Many African families have skeletons we refuse to name. In**st, abuse, coercion, mental illness , all these things are shrouded in silence to preserve the “integrity” of the family name. Children grow up gaslit, doubting their own memories, forced to play roles in dramas they never auditioned for. When they speak out, they are branded as rebellious, ungrateful, even mad.
But A.T.I’s death should be a wake-up call. Psychoanalysis teaches us that what is repressed will always return, often destructively. Fanon teaches us that liberation begins with naming the wound, refusing the lie, refusing to wear the mask.
Our poets, musicians, and prophets are often the first to break the silence. They speak the unspeakable, often at great personal cost. A.T.I did that through his music and through the many snapshots that he shared on social media.. We failed to hear him in time.
Perhaps we can honor him and others like him by finally having the conversations we have been avoiding. By asking our parents what really happened in their childhoods. By breaking the cycle of shame and control. By allowing our children to grow up free, not as extensions of our unresolved traumas.
As Fanon said, each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it. A.T.I’s mission seems to have been to force us to confront the shadow side of the African family, even if it cost him everything.
May we not look away. And may his soul rest in peace. ✌️ 🕊️
