My trauma didn’t happen when I was a child. I was a teenager but the experience was terrible enough to affect my mental well-being. Now that I’m in my thirties, 34 to be precise, I am realising how messed up my uncle was. I mean back then, we all knew but I know I won’t treat any nephew of mine the way he treated us.

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I am not saying my uncle was a bad man. He was very generous. Right from childhood, he supported me throughout my education. And I am always thankful for that. When I wrote my grade 12 exams, I left my hometown for the capital city, Lusaka, to pursue tertiary education. This time around too, he was the one paying for everything.

I enrolled at a well-known college in Zambia to study Laboratory Technology. Fortunately or I should rather say unfortunately, the school is just a five-minute walk from my uncle’s house. So we decided that instead of paying for the expensive accommodation on campus, I should live with my uncle while I go to school.

On the outside, I lacked nothing. I had nice clothes, expensive colognes, and fancy shoes. The kind of phones made me the envy of my classmates. They thought I was a rich kid who lived a good life. They didn’t know the price I had to pay for those things.

As the lastborn of nine children, I believe my uncle had unresolved childhood trauma. He dealt with it with alcohol and anger. There was no given day that this man did not drink himself into a stupor.

He would return home from work at 10 PM, drunk, angry, and ready to insult us. Whatever mental torments he suffered, we bore the brunt of it. He would say all sorts of demeaning things to us all night long. Then in the morning, he would give us fat wads of cash as a form of apology.

Before I moved to his house I was a brilliant student but my school work suffered because of him. I was constantly haunted by his words. Insomnia became my bedmate. Sometimes, I would be too sad to go to school in the morning.

People think insults are not a big deal because they are just words. After all, it’s not written on your skin. Trust me, nothing breaks a person’s soul and spirit more than damaging words. And my uncle’s insults were always cruel.

Me and my cousins who lived with him suffered. He often spoke about how stupid our parents (his siblings) were. He called them failures in life because they gave birth to us.

“You all end up like them when you grow up.”

We didn’t know what our parents did to him but he made sure he unleashed his bitterness on us.

I always tried to be strong but over time, my mental health began to crumble. I even started drinking alcohol like him, just to cope with his abuse.

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In his story, he was our saviour for giving us a better life. In our story, he was the monster who broke us when we were most vulnerable. If you think I am exaggerating, one day one of our cousins jumped from our flat and that’s how we lost him.

Now, we are all grown up and he is alone. He is always crying that the nephews he took care of don’t call or visit him. He is not lying, most of my cousins have blocked him everywhere.

Three Months After Our Breakup, He Got Married

We didn’t turn out the way he predicted. We are not failures. We are all doing fine and ideally, we should be reciprocating his generosity but nobody wants anything to do with him.

He has taught me that in this life, when we help someone, it should be done with an open heart. Let’s not do it begrudgingly or use the support we offer as a weapon to control and abuse the people we help.

—Ricky 

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