10 October 2025
On mental health, memory, and the unhealed emergencies of our time
By Steven Bernardus Harageib from the African Youth for Transitional Justice Platform (AY4TJ)
This year, World Mental Health Day asks us to consider the silent costs of humanitarian crises: not just what people lose, but what they are left carrying. It urges us to confront what mental health means in the context of war, displacement, violence, and recovery. But for many on the African continent, the crisis didn’t begin with the latest conflict, or pandemic. For some of us, the humanitarian emergency is generational. It has just never been named.
In countries like Namibia, we carry emergencies that the world stopped counting. The 1904-08 genocide against the Ovaherero and Nama. Decades of colonialism and apartheid. Dispossession. Sexual violence. Forced displacement. Loss of land, of loved ones. Our parents and grandparents were wounded, and no one came for them. No counselling. No national reckoning. No structured redress. Just silence and survival.
We were taught to be strong. Move on. Don’t dwell. But the body remembers. So do our children. So does the land. Today, trauma is treated like a private issue, an individual’s failure to cope. But the truth is: trauma can be national. Collective. Intergenerational. We medicate the symptoms, criminalise the responses, and underfund the services.
We now know that mental health and wellbeing cannot be an afterthought in policy. It must be a justice issue. That means asking hard questions about emotional safety, structural violence, and the silences. Because we cannot keep asking people to heal in systems that hurt or minimise their lived experiences.
Read: What does justice feel like for Namibians?
Across the continent, millions of young people are growing up inside legacies they didn’t choose—legacies of war, exile, sexual trauma, hunger, and inequality. We see it in the high rates of substance use, gender-based violence, suicide, self-harm, and internalised anger. And still we ask: why are they struggling?
But the struggle is not irrational. It is the result of un-metabolised memory. When trauma is not processed, it does not disappear, it just changes form. It passes on. It becomes behaviour. Disconnection. Depression. Numbing. Shame.
“We bury our people, but not our pain.”
—Herero elder, at a 2023 remembrance gathering
Mental health services remain underfunded, under-prioritised, and overly centralised. Namibia’s few psychiatric units cannot possibly meet the scale of national need and are often disconnected from community, culture, or care. Frontline workers such as social worker, psychologist and mental health practitioners themselves are often wounded healers, operating without the support or resourcing they require. And too often, they are asked to work inside frameworks that reduce trauma to checklists rather than address its historical, social, or gendered roots.
This is not sustainable.
We need a different kind of healing – one that centres justice, memory, and dignity.
We need to fund trauma-informed care, not just counselling services. We need to recognise the cost of silence, and the courage of those who break it. And we must create systems that do not punish pain, but make space for it.
Equally, we cannot treat trauma like it is separate from education, housing, safety, voice, or dignity. As long as we build systems that serve the body and not the mind, that favour stability over truth, that prize assimilation over authenticity, we will not be well.
So let us ask not just what mental health services we need, but what kind of society we want to build. One that numbs, or one that listens? One that isolates, or one that includes?
Mental health is not and should not be a side issue. It is the infrastructure of the future and those who do not invest in it now will keep paying for its absence in every other part of society.
For those shaping transitional justice policy and programming, our new brief launched today, “What does justice feel like? Intergenerational trauma, colonial legacies, and the fight for repair in Namibia” explores how psychosocial redress, reparations, and memory-work can become tools of national healing and why we can no longer afford to look away.
On this World Mental Health Day, may we remember: justice is not just about what happened. It’s about what still hurts, what we are willing to feel, and what justice might finally feel like if we made space for healing.
***
Interested in finding out more? Save the date for our webinar on Tuesday, 28 October (11:00-12:30 CET / 13:00 EAT)! Register now.
This brief is the second in a five-part youth-led series, ‘Legacy’, exploring the linkages between historical injustices, their enduring impacts in different African contexts, and the insufficiency of efforts to address these atrocities. Find out more.