I cannot sit here and claim to fully grasp what is going on, because I do not. Although if we are being honest, who amongst us does? The Epstein files are as confusing as they are destabilizing. Names appear without context. You wake up one morning and places are being mentioned without explanation. Today it is a prince from the UK, tomorrow it is a crown princess from a European country. And it just keeps going on and on and on. Like my country Kenya now appearing severally on the newly released files.
Even experts struggle to draw clean lines between what is implied and what remains deliberately obscured.
Are the Epstein files the dead cat, in the dead cat theory? Because what is the end goal? This has been going on for years, thousands of names have been dropped and yet, not a single person has been prosecuted apart from the man himself (who ended up committing suicide) and his wife. Will there ever be justice for the victims?
And how vile a human being must Jeffrey Epstein have been? Him, his cronies, the people who knew and those who suspected but looked away.
And perhaps that is what makes this whole moment so unbearable to process. It is not just about one dead financier and a growing pile of documents. It is about the slow, sick realization that what we are witnessing is not an anomaly, but a system working exactly as it was designed to. That Epstein could traffic children for years while dining with presidents, princes, professors and philanthropists is sickening. It makes me want to puke non stop. It is why powerful men can hurt children, laugh at the poor masses in private and pass “protective” legislation in public the next morning. It breaks my heart that the very people we vote for expecting to protect us are feigning savior mode while operating as predators behind closed doors.
We elect leaders and celebrate tycoons, only to discover that some of them were ganging up (yes, pun intended) to do unspeakable harm behind our backs while hiding under suits and titles.
For a long time, many of us in Africa watched from the sidelines while this was framed as an American scandal. A Western moral collapse playing out among billionaires, if you may. Politicians, royalty, celebrities – the whole nine yards. This was something happening far away in Hollywood, you see. And those people, well, those people seemed to exist in a universe far removed from ours.
Until, suddenly, it wasn’t.
Kenya. Nigeria. South Africa. Tanzania. Other African countries mentioned here and there sometimes in passing, sometimes more pointedly. Not always with clarity or context, but enough to jolt us out of spectator mode. Seeing all the reactions on social media left me wondering if the shock is that Africa appears in these conversations at all, or the fact that we ever believed we wouldn’t.
Pedophilia is not a foreign vice. It is not a Western invention. It exists in almost every society on earth. The only difference this time round, is that this was about power. Power determines who is protected, who is silenced, whose crimes are hidden behind wealth and whose suffering is dismissed as unfortunate but ordinary.
In Nigeria, child marriage has once again been thrust into the global spotlight. The outrage flares for a long minute before it fades (it always fades), while the girls at the center of these conversations continue to live with consequences they never consented to. Meanwhile in Kenya, stories of children disappearing surface with disturbing regularity. Some cases dominate headlines briefly while countless more vanish without resolution, absorbed into a familiar fog of bureaucratic failure and public fatigue.
Does this mean these cases are connected to Epstein or his network? Not really. There is no evidence to make such a claim, and it would be irresponsible to suggest otherwise. But the very fact that people are now asking the question speaks volumes. It reveals a growing awareness that systems enabling the exploitation of children are not isolated incidents but part of a global pattern that thrives where due to power and status.
The elephant in the room however, is the question; What is it with rich, powerful people and outrageously evil behavior?
Boredom, perhaps? A sense that everything else has already been done, bought, tasted and conquered, thus leaving only the forbidden as the final frontier? Me thinks it could be something darker: a compulsion to prove one’s exceptionality, to violate the very rules that govern ordinary people as a demonstration of power. In short, an insatiable urge to prove that you are not “normal” or “ordinary.”
Or maybe it could be that the wealthy are uniquely insulated. Their resources not only buy them pleasure, they also buy distance from consequences, scrutiny and from reality itself.
What unsettles many Africans watching this unfold is the familiarity of the silence that surrounded them. We recognize the patterns. The delayed justice and the victims who were known and spoken about, yet left unprotected for years.
So no, I am not writing this to invent conspiracies or declare Africa the secret center of a global trafficking ring. I am just airing my thoughts out loud, shocked like all and sundry.
