Do you understand what you have been taught? Or have you simply learned to repeat it well?
Most of what we know, we did not choose. It came with the house: our parents’ fears, our teachers’ certainties, our country’s habits, the way our first boss did things. We took it in before we were old enough to question it. By the time we were, it had already become how things are.
Some of it is gold. Some of it is old furniture, useful once and now in the way. And some of it is poison that we keep passing down because nobody ever stopped to look at the label.
Where I come from
I come from a broken family, with a long line of failed marriages and children born out of wedlock. The same patterns run through three, maybe four generations. I also grew up in a home where domestic violence was ordinary, from both sides: physical, verbal and psychological.
For a long time, I carried a quiet conclusion without ever saying it out loud: love and a good destiny are not for people like us.
At some point, I decided to look at those patterns seriously. I studied them. I asked questions, sometimes uncomfortable ones, to the people who had lived them. I prayed a lot. Slowly, I unlearned what that house had taught me.
I unlearned that love is not for us. I unlearned to fear marriage. I unlearned that violence is how you answer a disagreement.
I have been happily married for almost a year now. My wife and I had a wonderful wedding, shaped exactly the way we wanted it. I share it because, for years, I did not believe it was possible for someone with my story.
What I heard before my wedding
When people heard I was getting married, many of them felt the need to share their wisdom. A few examples, word for word, in the French they were said in:
« Tu ne l’as pas enceinte, pourquoi tu la maries ? »
She’s not even pregnant, so why are you marrying her?
« On verra si ça va durer trois ans. »
We’ll see if it lasts three years.
« J’espère que tu as bien réfléchi. Moi, quand je me réveille le matin, je vois un visage effrayant à côté de moi, et je me rappelle que c’est ma femme. »
I hope you’ve thought this through. When I wake up in the morning, I see a frightening face next to me, and then I remember it’s my wife.
« Quand tu vas voyager, tu vas croiser de belles femmes. Attends d’avoir 50 ans et plein de sous. »
When you travel, you’ll meet beautiful women. Wait until you’re 50 and have plenty of money.
Another person told me that they had married for tax reasons.
Most of these people were not wicked. They were repeating what they had seen, because that is how it had always been done around them. If those were the only marriages I had ever watched, I might have believed them.
Change what you are exposed to
This may be the most important thing I have to say: a huge part of unlearning is changing what you are exposed to.
You cannot unlearn a pattern while it is the only thing you ever see. If every marriage around you is a war or a contract, you will need to go and find marriages that are neither. Read about them. Spend time with couples who still laugh together after thirty years. Ask them how they do it. Let your eyes get used to something else.
The same goes for everything else. I also had to unlearn the idea that Africans cannot achieve anything great. That belief does not survive long once you are exposed to our history: the manuscripts of Timbuktu, centuries of scholarship written on our own soil; the Kingdom of Kongo, whose king, Afonso I, corresponded with the kings of Portugal and with the Pope in the early sixteenth century; and, in our own time, people like Wangari Maathai, whose Green Belt Movement planted tens of millions of trees in Kenya and who became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.1 Kamkwamba’s windmill is part of that story too.
Change your feed, your books, your friends, your rooms. Who you listen to every day slowly becomes how you think.
Says who?
Take any belief you hold firmly and ask where it came from. Some of the ones I hear most often:
- Men don’t cry. Says who? “Jesus wept.”2
- In Africa, we don’t show love in public. Then where are our children supposed to learn it?
- The arts are for people who failed in life. I have directed a choir since 2016, alongside a career in software.
- Past a certain age, your life is over. Abram was seventy-five when he left Haran.3
- If you come from a broken family, you will build a broken one. See above.
- Therapy is for crazy people. Therapy is for anyone carrying something too heavy to carry alone.
Some beliefs were true for the people who taught them, in their time and in their circumstances. Times change, and you are allowed to check. Honour your elders, keep what has been tested and still holds, and test the rest.
Your wounds are not a licence
Maybe you also grew up in a difficult family. Maybe a parent left. Maybe you lost someone too early, or your heart was broken, or your parents divorced, or your own marriage failed. That pain is real, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
But it is no reason to hurt others. It is no reason to reproduce the same patterns with your own spouse and children. And it is no reason to spend your life blaming the world for what happened to you. What was done to you was not your fault, but what you do with it now is up to you.
You don’t have to carry it alone. Seek help:
- Go to therapy. My wife, Flore, has spent four years helping people through SantéMentaleAfro, and I have seen it change lives.
- Talk to your friends, the ones who tell you the truth.
- Talk to your pastor, or to a mentor who has walked further than you.
- Talk to God. He already knows the whole story, and He is not shocked by it.
The proverb God told Israel to stop using
There was a saying in ancient Israel that sounds a lot like the one I grew up with. God addressed it directly:
What mean ye, that ye use this proverb concerning the land of Israel, saying, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge? As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occasion any more to use this proverb in Israel.
Your parents may have eaten sour grapes. Your teeth do not have to stay on edge. Paul says the same thing from another angle:
And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.
Renewing your mind means that something old has to go. In 1970, in Future Shock, Alvin Toffler argued that people should be taught “how to learn, unlearn and relearn”. He quoted the psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy: “Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.”4
How to unlearn
- Name the pattern: write down what keeps repeating in your family or in your own life. Be honest, even if it hurts.
- Study it: ask questions to the people who lived it, and look for where it started. Pray about what you find.
- Change your exposure: find people, books and rooms that show you another way, and spend real time there.
- Get help: a therapist, a friend, a pastor, a mentor, God. Nobody unlearns a generation of pain alone.
- Pass the torch: once you have unlearned something, teach it to the ones coming after you.
That last step matters most. When you have broken a pattern, don’t keep it to yourself. Tell your story to the young couple who are scared of marriage. Show your children what a disagreement without violence looks like. Light the torch for the next generation, so that they start where you finished.
Unlearn everything, at least once. Then learn again, this time on purpose, and let hope live on!
Footnotes
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Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977 and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. ↩
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John 11:35, the shortest verse in the Bible. ↩
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Genesis 12:4: “Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran.” ↩
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Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970), chapter 18. ↩