The crisis of manhood: Who will teach our boys what it means to be a man?
A gang of teenage boys. We find ourselves in a global ‘crisis of manhood’, and our boys are caught right in it.
What you need to know:
- African boys are growing up amid inequality, broken institutions and online influences that are reshaping how they understand manhood.
- With traditional mentors disappearing, boys are turning to algorithms, gangs and online communities to find identity and belonging.
A waiter drops a tray of glasses. For one second, the whole restaurant stops. Forks freeze mid-air. Conversations die. Then, just as fast, the room goes back to normal. Someone sweeps up the glass. Nobody asks where the broken pieces went.
That is what is happening to boys in our cities right now, quietly, frequently, and no one is paying attention. Some things have been breaking in boys for years. Not all at once, but quietly and with devastating effect: at homes in Nairobi, Lagos, Kampala and Johannesburg; in gang corners in Soweto; bedrooms in Cairo, where a screen glows at 2am, a 14-year-old who stopped finishing his sentences six months ago, and whose father has not noticed.
We find ourselves in a global ‘crisis of manhood’, and our boys are caught right in it. They watch leaders steal billions while their mothers queue for water. They watch music videos that measure a man's worth in cars, women, and contempt. The lesson lands everywhere they look: power is what matters, and it does not come from patience, service or concern for others. It comes from dominance.
When a politician loots the treasury and nothing happens, boys watch and learn; a pastor abuses his flock, and the church protects him; a CEO steals from his company and still makes the cover of a business magazine. The lesson is simple, and it is devastating: The rules are for people without connections. For a boy between 10 and 18, right in the middle of figuring out who he is, that lesson largely begins to define his worldview; it influences him and shapes him.
Boys are extremely polarised: One extreme is driven by dominance, no feelings, sex and money; the other goes the other way: They disappear into their rooms, into gaming, porn, extremist forums, hiding from the pain of their present reality, lost, angry, and desperate. The healthy middle, where most boys used to grow up, is empty, with no strong male presence or elders to lead and guide young men.
Without legitimate ways to feel like one matters, boys find illegitimate ones; they always do, because boys must wander, and where they head largely depends on what and who is guiding. Gangs are rarely about crime; they are about belonging. Betting apps give short bursts of meaning, an epidemic, sold hardest to people who can least afford to lose.
Drugs offer relief not just from boredom, but from shame as well, and shame is one of the most powerful things I see in young men and boys who are looking for something to help them, and yet it is one of the least talked about.
Extremist groups, from the Sahel to Southern Africa, understand this, the deep needs of a boy: A boy with no identity is a boy who can be handed one, even a hateful one. Especially an angry hateful one. Because being seen, even by people who only want to use you, beats being invisible.
The algorithm replaced the elder
In the past, boys did not cross into manhood alone. There were elders. Rituals. Ceremonies that said: we see you, we have got you. Today, the guide is a TikTok algorithm; a global network of online men, the "manosphere," has found a huge audience among African boys, mostly because they say something true first: being a young man today is genuinely hard. Then they often attach a poisonous answer to it, one that surrenders a boys’ agency to values that are extractive and deficit. But a drowning boy rarely stops to ask who is really behind the hand pulling him up.
What we do about it
Mentorship. A steady, caring relationship with an older man is one of the strongest protections against violence and gang life that we know of. We need men to come back into boys' lives, not as enforcers, but as guides. Ubuntu already has the answer: you do not become a man alone. You become one with others.
Schools need to give boys more time to play, push and compete, and in that process begin to learn how to name and process their feelings, not just pass exams. A boy who can say and recognise what he feels is a boy far less likely to act it out with his fists.
And fathers, or what I prefer to call significant men, need to show up again, on purpose. The strongest intervention we have costs nothing but presence: a man who shows up, stays, guides, listens and lets his son see him live boldly.
Somewhere right now, a boy is watching a man, building his sense of who to become from what he sees. He cannot help it. That is just how boys grow: they see, copy, repeat and decide whether it fits the idea they are moulding; men have always learnt from observing other men.
The upheaval is real: broken institutions, obscene inequality, a loneliness our boys do not have words for yet. But our boys are not lost. They are looking. The only question is whether there is something or someone worth finding.
The writer is the Founder & CEO of Yazua Afrika, a boys' development organisation.
