Masculinity is in much dispute in the contemporary world. While concepts of manhood have always existed, the current preoccupation with masculinity dates to the 1990s, when the meaning of maleness appears to have become the object of heightened scrutiny. An early inkling of what was at stake was wryly captured in the 1997 movie The Full Monty. Modest in everything but its subject matter, the film’s unusual popularity was evidence that it struck a cultural nerve. The story centered on a group of steel workers in Thatcherite Britain who suddenly found themselves stripped not merely of their jobs, but their masculinity as well. Bereft of other marketable skills, they resorted to stripping before riotous females. The movie seems to suggest that masculinity no longer arises from merely being male but instead requires a convincing performance of effective manhood. But the conditions for pulling this performance off, so to speak, have become increasingly inauspicious.
In a 2021 blog post, feminist critic and blogger Jessa Crispin claimed that “Men are slipping by just about every marker of measurement. Homicide rates are up, and more men are delaying marriage and the establishment of a family. Twice as many men have addiction disorders as women.” Crispin was referring to the United States, but she could have been speaking of a multitude of other countries experiencing similar trends. The discourse of troubled manhood is especially audible in Africa, where scholars argue that increasing numbers of men are unable to achieve “ideals of masculinity” such as marriage and the means to found families of their own. Instead, male youth appear condemned to a marginal state of “waithood,” edged out of the neoliberal workplace by enterprising, rights-toting women. Targeted by AIDS educators, evangelical preachers, and critical feminists, they are also challenged by increasingly emboldened, alternative sexual identities. In fact, fear of emasculation has become a collective nightmare. According to scholar-journalist Jonny Steinberg, young males in rural South Africa harbor widespread fears of sexual inadequacy and infantilization; their counterparts in Nigeria, writes Ebenezer Obadare, are beset by recurrent rumors of penis theft, both literal and metaphorical.
Simultaneously, early twenty-first century therapeutic and social policy outlets gave graphic accounts of defiantly resurgent forms of manhood in Africa: a so-called rogue, toxic, hyper-masculinity, which is widely associated with gender-based violence, crime, and militarism. It is important to note, however, that the church and state abet brutal attacks on women and gender non-conforming people; more than thirty African countries criminalize LGBTQ+ persons today. These assaults tend to be enmeshed in wider societal structures of political violence, precarity, and civil strife. Terms like “toxic masculinity,” however, often take on inflated, sensationalist lives in popular and political discourse, masking the more complex, underlying causes and motives of these assaults. Cultural anthropologist Jack Boulton argues that this reductive narrative of masculinity reinforces glib caricatures of the “violent [African] man” who has increasingly been gendered and reduced to naturalized, primal notions of sexuality in ways formerly reserved for women. Criminologists and policymakers often depict masculine behavior as the product of a hormonal predisposition to dominate and brutalize. As a consequence, the qualities defining masculinity are ever more susceptible to critical moral judgement, what Simon Watney calls a “politics of intense moral purity.”
Those who wish to understand, or meaningfully intervene in, issues of gender violence in Africa or elsewhere would be wise to move beyond stereotype and hyperbole to examine the local histories of sexuality, culture, and political economy that feed such practices. In southern Africa, where debate about masculinity is especially vibrant, it is impossible to grasp gender relations without considering the lingering effects of colonialism and race. The apartheid regime depended on the exploitation of black men’s labor by white men. English-speaking middle-class males might have vied for such white supremacy with Afrikaner would-be sons of the soil, but these contestations masked what Belinda Bazzoli called a “patchwork quilt” of patriarchies that consolidated the structural violence shaping the extractive economy. Thus, the degrading discipline that shaped the industrial workplace built upon the paternalist authority being meted out by traditional leaders and family heads in black laborers’ communities.
The end of apartheid and the order of racial domination did not eliminate the “patriarchal bargain.” Instead, it transformed its terms. While the advent of democratic rule in 1994 in South Africa empowered a new black ruling elite and enshrined a strong constitutional commitment to gender equity and sexual freedom, political authority remained predominantly male. As Robert Morell et al. point out, the avuncular figure of Nelson Mandela might have personified a “more thoughtful, egalitarian” masculinity, but the challenge of meeting postcolonial expectations in increasingly inauspicious times has favored more aggressive patriarchal leaders. Populists such as Jacob Zuma and Julius Malema, whose flirtations with violence and voracious sexuality signal an uncompromising masculine will to power, appeal to young men facing joblessness and dependency. Official professions notwithstanding, members of the police and the wider public – both black and white – still seem willing to condone a reality where men define their masculinity in terms of their ability to control women and their bodies. Rates of gender-based violence and rape are notoriously difficult to compute with accuracy in an understudied region like Africa, but scholars understand that they were scandalously high under apartheid, and they unfortunately remain impervious to the contemporary rule of law.
These conditions are not unique to Africa. Foucault claimed that the modern West was preoccupied with extracting truth from sex, and Franz Fanon argued that the generic object of this urge was the eroticized black body. Colonizers relied centrally on the language of sexuality to draw the line between civilized, Christian decency and the intimate practices of the colonized savages. From the putative promiscuity of polygamy to the licentiousness held to be the source of AIDS, African sexuality has served as a foil to European claims to superiority, cultivation, and modernity. As the “cradle of life,” Africa has also been the metaphorical ground zero for racist contrasts between pathology and health, degeneracy and dignity; all the more so now with African masculinity once again called into question.
A number of engaged researchers have recently sought to counter these archetypes by documenting the grounded realities of male life in particular times and places. Masculinity in Africa, they insist, is both varied and fluid, offering innumerable examples of males who are “good at being men;” good at being sons and leaders, husbands and fathers. It is not enough, however, to insist that African masculinities are plural and virtuous. Recurrent patterns of gender relations, some of them disconcerting, call for more systemic explanations, as they present something of a paradox. On the one hand, there is evidence, in many places, of what some have called “hegemonic masculinity,” a mode of gender-based hierarchy in which some men dominate both women and other weaker males through varying levels of coercion, legitimate and otherwise.
Yet there are also diverse scholarly accounts from both urban and rural contexts that speak of masculinity in distress: a growing fraction of younger males are struggling, against mounting odds, to gain access to the resources needed to become adult men in their own right, to found families or careers of their own. State contraction, diminishing wage work, and the burgeoning of informal, predominantly female trade all favor the operations of cadres of “big men,” patrons who subserviate younger male clients in exchange for the means of survival. In such circumstances, increasing numbers of young men seem condemned to one or another form of perpetual dependency. The growth of criminal enterprise, thug enforcement, and militarized conflict are the dark underside of economic crisis and growing male abjection, spurring recruitment to various forms of “dangerous work” – for example, smuggling, banditry, and, as scholars like Daniel Agbiboa demonstrate, participation in armed insurrectionist movements such as Boko Haram.
These practices are hardly exhaustive of the diverse histories of masculinity in Africa. Men coerced into colonial mine labor, for instance, also forged cultures built on pride in their virile labor; on the convivial arts of leisure and mutuality (like drinking, dancing, or football); and on organizing acts of defiance and political resistance. Pithead prophets led Africanized churches whose male-voice choirs sang novel songs of redemption. Work-based recreational groups dared to dream of unprecedented visions of masculinity, black and white – hence the emergence of so-called “Swenkers,” South African migrant workers who spent their weekends voguing up-market urban masculinities, mastering their dress, dispositions, and gestures in exquisite detail.
The dream continues. In a 2018 piece in the New York Times entitled “Cape Town’s New Masculinity,” Zane Lelo Meslani reported that the city has become a frontier in the battle against Western gender roles. Young people from its depressed surrounding townships have given birth to a vibrant club scene that, while reminiscent of the creative male gay role play of Paris is Burning, is firmly rooted in African colonial history. In their playful use of hairstyle, language, and apparel, they project a “fresh, unrestricted image of African gender and masculinity that rejects the dominant masculine ideal of toughness, even in a hostile world.” In fact, their creative self-styling has become the basis of a vibrant new fashion industry – suggesting that the most promising pointers to modes of redressing the challenges of African masculinity might come directly from the men themselves. The continent’s youth, as a young activist told the UN Security Council in 2019, are “the most informed, resilient and coolest generation;” they are “hustlers who refuse to resign themselves to the hardships of their situations.” Those who aim to revitalize Africa’s masculine futures would do well to heed the insights offered by such grassroots visionaries.
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Jean Comaroff is the Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American Studies and Anthropology at Harvard University, and Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town. She was educated at the University of Cape Town and the London School of Economics, and her research — primarily conducted in southern Africa — has focused on the interplay of capitalism, modernity, and (post)colonialism, and on theorizing the contemporary world from beyond its hegemonic centers. Her writing has covered a range of more specific topics: religion and medicine, magic and materiality, law and crime, democracy, and the politics of difference.
Image credit: Freepik
