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The world is on the move, and the shift from deeply conservative worldviews to more liberal, interrogative ones is accelerating.
Across the globe, people are learning to question long‐held beliefs, push back against harmful practices, and embrace the abundance of knowledge now available. What began as a cultural reawakening in the West has spread across the global south, particularly Africa, where young people are fearlessly challenging the foundations of their socialization.
As someone who believes in coherent and evolving belief systems, I find this liberating. Social media today is rich with African women telling their stories, confronting oppression, and reshaping narratives with educated conviction.
Men, too, are adopting new knowledge and breaking away from practices their grandparents defended as sacred. This has brought needed scrutiny to traditions such as bride price, forced marriage, and female genital mutilation; practices that deserved to be questioned, challenged, and, in many cases, abandoned.
Yet in this energetic push toward transformation, something concerning is happening. In our haste to discard the harmful aspects of culture, we risk throwing away the quiet, essential practices that once sustained our communities, both emotionally and socially.
The chaff is being thrown out, yes, but much of the wheat is going with it. As a Ugandan from a Bantu‐speaking tribe, one of these “wheat grains” is our manner of greeting. Each morning begins with “Wasuze otya?” which translates to “How was your night?” or “Did you sleep well?”
Though it appears ordinary, even mundane, the greeting serves a deeper purpose. It is a daily emotional check‐in disguised as etiquette. In many Ugandan households, greeting your elders is not optional.
It is a ritual that ensures everyone is accounted for, everyone is seen, and everyone is alive. Through a simple greeting, one learns who slept peacefully, who struggled, and who may need support.
In a home where greeting is ignored, someone could silently suffer, or even pass on, without immediate notice. Beyond greetings, Bantu culture is built on a profound sense of community. Even the word Bantu itself used to describe one of Africa’s largest ethnic groups, which directly translates to “People.”
It is a reminder that identity, wellbeing, and survival were never individual pursuits; they were collective. In most Bantu‐speaking tribes in Uganda and across Africa, the word for maternal aunt is not simply “aunt.”
It translates to, or closely resembles, “younger mother” or “other mother.” The language reflects the expectation that your mother’s sister is another mother to you. You do not go hungry near your other mother’s home.
You are fed, guided, corrected, and protected, all without ceremony or request. This sense of extended motherhood was not limited to relatives. It stretched to friends, neighbors, and long‐time family acquaintances who all saw themselves as responsible for the wellbeing of one another.
It was a living network of emotional and practical support, a community woven tightly enough that no one could quietly fall through the cracks. Today, however, as more people retreat behind fenced homes and gated neighbourhoods, that interconnectedness is fading.
The physical barriers have become emotional ones too, severing the everyday interactions that once functioned as quiet but powerful systems of care. These traditions, imperfect as they were, formed an informal mental‐health support system long before the concept ever reached formal health ministries.
And yet, these are the very practices being quietly abandoned as we rush to modernize. The consequences are becoming visible. In February 2026, the Ugandan government launched the State of Uganda Population Report 2025, officially declaring mental health a “Silent Emergency.”
The report revealed a staggering 71 per cent surge in reported mental‐health cases over just four years, rising from roughly 494,000 to more than 843,000 cases. Depression is increasingly prevalent among the youth; suicide rates are climbing; emotional isolation is deepening.
Many of these conditions grow from unresolved trauma, unspoken burdens, and a lack of consistent social support. While the causes are complex, including economic strain, digital pressures, and shifting family structures, there is an undeniable link to the disappearing culture of daily communal presence.
It may sound simplistic, but the absence of a genuine “How did you sleep?” or the loss of an “other mother” who checks in, advises, or simply notices, these small disappearances accumulate.
They create silence, and silence is where mental‐health crises grow. Africa is in the midst of a powerful transformation, one that is necessary, courageous, and long overdue. But if we are to build stronger futures, we must be careful not to discard the cultural threads that once held us together.
Not all old ways were oppressive; some were deeply protective. Not all traditions restrained us; some kept us alive. As we champion our new knowledge and embrace progressive thinking, let us also reclaim the best of the cultures that nurtured our ancestors.
The solution to our modern mental‐health emergency may not lie only in imported frameworks or distant interventions. Some solutions may already exist in our languages, our greetings, our communal homes, and our inherited ways of being. In discarding the ineffective tools of the past, let us not lose the old brooms that may still sweep clean our new predicaments.
The writer is concerned about mental health issues.
Related
, https://observer.ug/viewpoint/why-africas-mental-health-crisis-needs-a-bantu-cure/
