- Men from disadvantaged communities must admit to living in fear and weakness.
- Generational trauma has turned courage into silence and compromise.
- To rebuild the nation, men must rediscover self-respect, truth, and spiritual strength
We men, especially from the so-called disadvantaged backgrounds and communities, must confess something to God and the ancestors. Nay, to our sons and daughters who are supposedly the future of this country. Let the world and humanity know that we are afraid and weak men.
For the first time in almost five decades, from 1990 to 2025, a whole new generation, our children and their children, have seen us cower in fear. Until now, for the first time, they have seen the face and heard the voice of fearless courage: it is General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi.
They have seen what a self-respecting patriot, especially a black man in a supremacist society, looks like. But most of the men they live with and see in their homes and lives are weak men. Self-compromised. And this has caused a lot of damage to the psyche of the young, our sons.
We have forgotten who we are
If we were to be honest, most of the trauma and pain we have seen in the last 45 years was not caused by apartheid. Apartheid is a man-made infrastructure that can be changed. Worse, it was destined to fail and self-destruct with a little push from its opponents within and without. And that is what happened. Much as it persists in so many ways, it is a deodorised corpse. It survives because we men are weak. Times have moved on, but things have remained the same, unchanged. And this has changed us, too.
We don’t know who we are. We have forgotten what we want. Sizilibele ukuthi sizalwa ngobani. We do not carry ourselves like descendants of warrior kings whose names we no longer recognise. Yes, we are dispossessed and still live and work in a supremacist, patriarchal, and capitalist society. But we have lost the courage to question authority, to challenge the system, let alone to stand up. We have lost the will to say no when evil reigns supreme, and it reigns supreme because there are no good men of courage willing to be voices of conscience.
Weakness disguised as survival
We have chosen to stay silent when we should have spoken. It is 45 years into freedom and democracy, yet we have no voice. We self-censor and mute ourselves. We are the men who choose safety, security, and comfort over courage. We are full of excuses and have no discipline. It is a serious indictment that we would rather hang onto our second-hand houses, jobs, and expensive cars than stand up and speak truth to power.
We shall allow criminals to build our walls and buy us braai packs. If we have to choose between a BMW and principle, we shall choose the former. It is just like that. We have no regrets. We have no shame.
Worse, an increasing number of us are returned soldiers. We have lost our wives and families because we could not confront a disrespectful wife. Worse, we are not quite equipped to deal with the modern African woman. The corollary is that we also lose our children. The courts give them to women who are not fit to be mothers, to be their fathers. Yet we neither have the resources nor the energy to fight a crooked system that does not recognise African law and culture. Yet we have the highest number of advocates and lawyers in recorded history.
The slow death of courage
So, we gather at tshisanyamas to drink and dance ourselves into early graves. We feel abandoned and alone. Thus, we do not have the strength to face our fears. We are so weak that we destroy everything we touch — state institutions and resources. This hurts us deeply and leaves wounds of the spirit that do not fade with time. They hurt more when we are alone, living in regret.
No man is perfect. We all make mistakes. But it looks like we are condemned to live in a permanent state of mistake. We keep on falling, watching others fall, and rejoicing when they come tumbling down. But we don’t learn. So, we repeat the same mistakes. We pretend that we could not have done things differently. We weak men will never admit our failure. We hide them behind rose-coloured glasses. We pretend to be different, role models.
Our forefathers lost the land, and we are not willing to fight or speak for its return. Worse, we do not own or control the economy. We lack solidarity and compassion for the disadvantaged. We do not talk about Robert Sobukwe anymore. We talk about Steve Bantu Biko only once a year, in September, where we celebrate his death in the name of remembrance. Not much is highlighted about his birth in 1948, the year that marked the official introduction of apartheid.
The walking dead
And we are getting buried alive in the process. We are the walking dead, zombies looking for places to hide. Time waits for no man. The years are passing on. You get to 50 or 60 or 70, and you wonder what happened to the decades. You have nothing or little to show for your success. No decent home or dignified clothes. You wear the same clothes twice in a week. You did not realise you wasted time attending jazz festivals and social gatherings with lots of booze every week, trying to be socially relevant.
You messed around and have more than two abandoned children with different mothers. Lost time cannot be regained. Those 60 minutes are gone and not coming back. They have turned 60 years or more, wasted. At some point, you look back and realise that you did not just waste hours, days, or weeks. You wasted years and decades. When Number 1, a “Wasted 9 Years”, becomes your legacy.
Our time of monsters
We have failed to protect our children. Worse, we are absent fathers. There is no guarantee that our children will reach greater heights than we. Without being leaders in our homes, which are chaotic and in disarray, mostly led by children or women, we are too weak to lead the nation. We have learned to bend to pressure. We are forever ready to compromise. It started long before Kempton Park talks about talks. We shall do anything for 30 pieces of silver. It is easy to manipulate us. You only have to show us the money, and everything changes.
In many instances, we cower and surrender in fear. We do not stand for anything, thus we fall for anything. As we go deeper into democracy and grow older, we have witnessed and experienced the Fatherland reduced to wreckage. Today, South Africa, once a beacon of hope and promise, is widely regarded as a crime scene. And all this happened under our watch.
We have no more tears to weep. We changed the course of history in 1976, if we did. But now we suffer from struggle fatigue. We have no energy to stand. We have grown round in the belly. The power is gone. We have long passed the point of no return. We must beat a retreat now to allow the young to rediscover their mission and to come forward to seize power. Young people must take the responsibility to create the future they want. We are done. This is their future. We shall not live there.
Facing the man in the mirror
I am not too sure that it is centuries of dispossession, exploitation, and oppression that have really weakened us. We have human agency. We make choices. We have no power to fight back or lift ourselves. We are weak now. It is not going to change anything, our regret. We are fighting among ourselves for positions, power, recognition, and access to state resources. We shoot women and men who have the courage to speak up — Babita Deokaran and others. We do not even know how to spend the money. What can one man do with a tender of R360 million from the police?
We are at that point where we look back and we do not like what we see. We cannot face the man in the mirror. We are a mess that has created a monumental mess in the best country in Africa. It is only when we accept that we have failed ourselves that we shall change. We have failed humanity because it is fear that rules this country. It is as if we do not know Steve Biko, who desired for us to “give a human face to the world.” Instead, we have transmogrified into beasts. This is our time. Our turn to eat. It is the time of monsters.
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