A woman on an auction block does not need a doctrine to be raped. She needs a buyer, a whip, and enforced silence from every direction that might otherwise speak.

The silence was not accidental. 

It was built, and it was not built in America. She stood on American soil, but the mind that put her there had crossed an ocean to get there. It had been forming since 1452, when a pope in Rome granted a Portuguese king the right to subdue and enslave the people of the African coast, and to call it a Christianising mercy while he did so. 

Colonial conquest not only took land but also uprooted spirit, memory, and a sense of belonging. It turned names into Christian names.

Almost every African nation bears the scars of colonialism, but some of the deepest wounds are not visible in borders or economies; they are spiritual. The encounter between European Christianity and indigenous African belief systems was fundamentally not a dialogue but an erasure.

Oppression does not arise from a dark inevitability in human nature. It happens when fear, hierarchy, and unprocessed trauma come together. Many cultures have struggled with these forces, though not all have fallen victim to them; some endured through reciprocity, others through domination.

Oppression, then, is not innate to humanity; it is a defensive structure born from wounds. What is learned through fear can, with care, be unlearned through humility.

In the West, Gaza is often perceived not as a tragedy but as a threat, a site of moral confusion, political fatigue, and symbolic inversion. Here, victimhood dons the uniform of an army. Occupation articulates the language of self-defence. And an open-air prison is depicted as a battleground between equals.

How did we arrive here?