Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

A friend asked me why I was spending my precious weekend on what he called “a testosterone farm.” His follow-up: “Is poverty and therapy not enough?”

Four reasons. I gave him four reasons.

One: My ignorance is infinite, and prejudice is a long-term emotional marriage — a commitment to ignorance. I wanted to compare notes from This Country Hates Our Men (Boys) book,  across races and nations. The retreat spoke the language I respect: male psychodrama, shadows,  Jung, Adler, archetypes, rites of passage.

Two: I am a man whose interior remains broken while his exterior is well-decorated. I wanted to meet the parts of me I allow to make me less than my ideal self.

Three: I run African Men Care non profit. I don’t send young men where I haven’t been myself.

Four: Therapy is necessary but not sufficient. I wanted another modality — and something to bring to my next session.

I chose Johannesburg over Cape Town. Cape Town, I suspected, would be less racially diverse — predominantly men with low melanin. For those who missed melanocytes 101: Caucasian skin carries roughly 4.5 μg/mg of melanin; darker skin exceeds 10 μg/mg, giving a natural SPF of ~13.4 versus ~3.3.

Johannesburg promised something rarer: men across all class strata, all races, multiple African countries, European Union, UK  and yes — a few from  a Trump world.


Over 50 men. One farm. Think Kamp Staaldraad 2003 without the barbed wire amd controversy.

The first thing I read, on an elder’s t-shirt walking in:

“When men talk about their feelings, the world is a safer place.”

The first rule, like every place men gather: what happens on the Johannesburg farm stays there. I won’t tell you what we did. I won’t spoil the film. I’ll tell you what I learned.

LESSON 1: Men want to be men
Masculinity has become a pebble in society’s shoe — something to be solved, managed, apologised for. The word now arrives pre-loaded: toxic, hegemonic, fragile, oppressive, pathological, Luciferian. Men are expected to apologise for XY chromosomes, testosterone, the whole configuration.

The men at this retreat wanted to be Lions of Judah and Lambs of Christ. To hold both without having to choose. But the messages they receive are contradictory to the point of cruelty: Man up. Be vulnerable. Be strong. Don’t be weak. Show your feminine energy — but not too much. Provide. But I don’t need your money. If you have no money, what are you useful for? Protect. Protect. Protect.

When asked what stands in the way of men becoming whole, one word dominated the room:

Emotions. Their absence.

LESSON 2: Alexithymia — words without feelings

Most men have a dramatically limited emotional vocabulary. The condition has a clinical name: alexithymia — the inability to identify and describe feelings. The dominant emotion most men know, and over-deploy, is anger. In excess: rage.
Rage, I learned, is depression expressed outward. It is almost always a secondary emotion — a mask worn over fear, sadness, or shame. Anger feels more powerful than vulnerability. So men reach for it.

A few insights I learnt about sadness, shame and fear:

Past Pain → Shame & Sadness
Both are backward-facing emotions. Shame says “I am wrong” — it attacks identity. Sadness says “something good is gone” — it mourns loss. Together they keep you anchored in what was, what failed, what hurt.

Future Anxiety → Fear
Fear is forward-facing. It projects a threat onto what hasn’t happened yet. It’s the mind trying to protect you from the pain it imagines — often the same pain that already lives in the past.


What triggers SADNESS:
Sexual abuse in childhood — far more widespread and far less spoken about than anyone admits. The silence of these provocative and painful events  is its own wound.

Abandonment Wounding — maternal and paternal, and both are painful, they  leave devastating results. Fathers are expected to exit. Mothers, in the mythology of family, never abandon their own. When yours does, the implied verdict is: you must be the problem. Society places motherhood on a pedestal, so the abandoned son cannot grieve openly without seeming ungrateful or breaking a silent family rule. A mother’s abandonment often hits a child’s foundational sense of security and worth. It can leave a boy feeling like he is fundamentally “unlovable” because the person who brought him into the world couldn’t stay.

A father’s abandonment often impacts a boy’s identity and competence. Fathers typically represent the “bridge” to the outside world; without that, a boy might struggle with knowing how to be a man, how to handle aggression, or how to feel confident in his abilities

Research is clear: a mother’s absence creates an emotional void — the child feels fundamentally unlovable. A father’s absence creates an identity void — the boy doesn’t know how to become a man. Both are devastating. Both are different. The severity depends on age, whether the leaving was a choice or a loss, and crucially — whether someone else stepped into the gap.

What triggers FEAR:
Not being enough. Can’t provide. Can’t satisfy.

Sexual performance anxiety — ED (Erectile Dysfunction)  coded not as a medical condition but as a verdict on manhood.

Fear of being a loser. The world is not nice to men who are losers because “Indonda Must XYZ”.

Fear of violent men, and the specific terror that comes from knowing most violent crimes are committed by a significant minority of your own demographic — men afraid of men.

What triggers SHAME:
Sexual abuse — unspoken, because speaking it confirms the vulnerability.

Infidelity — both directions, but being cheated on carries particular weight for men. Society offers the betrayed woman sympathy. It offers the betrayed man ridicule. His masculinity is called into question. He failed to keep her. He was blind in his own house. He couldn’t protect what was his. There are no support networks for this shame — only the instruction to man up and bury it.

Children born outside the covenant — impregnating another woman, or discovering the children you raised belong to another man. The evolutionary dimension here is not metaphorical. The humiliation runs deep.

Physical and verbal abuse — especially when public, witnessed by friends, classmates, siblings. The audience makes it unforgivable. The memory is permanent.

Letting people down — young men who feel they are wasting the resources their successful parents invested in them. Squandering the sacrifice.

Addictions – Shame does not knock. It does not wait for discovery. It is fully operational in private — present before the act, alive during it, and resident long after. The man knows. That is enough. He knows when he opens the app in the dark. He knows when he drives past a certain street and does not drive past it. He knows when he counts what he should not be counting — the pills, the drinks, the visits, the lies stacked on top of lies. Drugs. Pornography. Sex bought, extracted, or pursued in corridors it should never have entered. Masturbation that stopped being natural and became the only time he felt anything close to release. Strip clubs as a substitute for intimacy he does not know how to ask for. Prescription pills that stopped being medical six months ago. Cough syrup measured before the family wakes. None of this is about pleasure anymore. It is pain management in the absence of any other available option. These are not moral failures in isolation — they are men bleeding from wounds the world told them were not there, self-medicating in the dark with whatever the dark provides.

And the shame compounds. The first wave: what I did. The second, heavier wave: what I am still doing and have not stopped — the slow suffocation of carrying the secret through school runs and boardrooms and anniversary dinners and Sunday morning handshakes, performing a version of yourself that no longer exists. The fear of being caught is acute and survivable. What is less survivable is knowing you have not been caught — the chronic weight of a man who must maintain the lie indefinitely, who must look his child in the eye and hold it together, who must be fully present while being entirely absent inside.

But the most lethal shame of all is what happens when a man finally breaks. When he tells the truth and discovers that honesty was a trap. That disclosure is not met with grace but with a sentence. He is not seen as a man in pain who found his way to the wrong exits. He is seen as the thing he confessed. The act becomes his identity. The wound becomes his name. The man disappears and the addiction remains — permanent, public, definitional. And so the next man watches. And learn. And says nothing. And goes deeper. And we wonder why he seems so far away.

What about JOY – Surely a man needs Joy ? You may ask:

Joy is the one emotion men are trained to perform only in narrow corridors.

The stadium. The braai. The moment the deal closes. Even then, it’s contained — a fist pump, not a full-bodied surrender to delight. The kind of joy that is unguarded, spontaneous, childlike — that gets policed out of boys early.

What gets killed in the process:
The boy who dances because music moves him becomes the man who nods his head slightly. The child who squeals at the ocean becomes the adult who says “it’s nice.” Joy requires a kind of openness and vulnerability that masculinity norms treat as weakness.

And here’s the deeper wound — joy is present-tense by nature. It lives right now. It doesn’t strategise or protect or perform. For men who have been conditioned to always be building, guarding, providing, achieving — the present moment itself becomes uncomfortable. There’s no task in joy. Just being. And many men have never been taught that being is enough.

If shame and sadness anchor men in the past, and fear drives them into the future — joy is the emotion of the present that they were never given permission to inhabit.

No wonder so many men are either haunted or anxious. The middle ground — delight, play, wonder — was surrendered in the price of becoming “a man”.

LESSON 3: Men feel abandoned by government

“They even have a Minister of Women, Persons with Disability and Children. They should just say girls.”
“Why leave out men and boys?”
“The government declares GBV and femicide a national crisis. What about men who die from violence? We do not matter.”

A political scientist in our group framed it coldly. Politicians chase votes. In South Africa, women make up 55.25% of registered voters — 15.3 million versus 12.4 million men in 2024. Turnout: 62% of registered women vote, versus 55% of men. A gap of nearly 2.5 million votes.

Men aren’t just emotionally unrepresented. They’re electorally weak. The market for their welfare doesn’t exist.

The White Paper for Social Welfare (1997) and its implementation have prioritised women, children, the elderly, and persons with disability. Men and boys are, by omission, outside the welfare architecture.

An elder said what everyone was thinking:
“Ignored males are burning the villages, townships, suburbs and cities — just to feel their warmth.”

CONCLUSION: Found Sons & Men
Race, tribe, and nationality are sometimes a distraction. At this retreat, men from different countries, different colours, different classes discovered the same shadows, the same archetypes, the same root wounds. When men stop seeing demographic categories and start seeing humans, something loosens. Empathy forms. Loyalty forms. A male club built not on dominance but on pro-social traits — egalitarian, respectful upstanders, zero tolerance for gender-based violence, role models, present fathers and loving husbands.

So what do men need to become whole men?

Not another campaign telling them what they’re doing wrong. Not another framework built around managing their worst impulses. Men need what every human being needs — but delivered in language and spaces that don’t require them to first dismantle their identity to enter.

They need permission to feel — not just anger, which is the only emotion the culture has consistently allowed them, but the full register: grief, fear, shame, tenderness, joy. Alexithymia is not fate. It is a learned poverty of the inner life, and it can be unlearned.

They need initiated elders — men who have done the work and are willing to turn around and reach back. The crisis of masculinity is, in large part, a crisis of transmission. Boys becoming men without men to show them how. The retreat worked precisely because older men who had wrestled with their own shadows were in the room. Presence, not prescription.

They need safe containers — spaces where the rules of ordinary social performance are suspended. Where “man up” is not the answer to everything. Where breaking down is not losing. The farm outside Johannesburg was one such container. We need thousands more. In rural villages. In  townships. In boardrooms. In churches. In schools.

They need their wounds acknowledged by the state — not as a competition with women’s suffering, but as a parallel truth. Boys are being sexually abused. Men are dying from violence. Men are taking their own lives in silence. Men are not in education – employment and training (NEET).  A welfare architecture that has no architecture for men is not neutral. It is a choice with consequences — consequences we are all living with.

And finally — they need each other. Not the performance of brotherhood around sport and braai, but the real thing. The kind that was present on that farm. Men sitting in a circle, stripped of titles and social media handles, saying: I was abandoned. I was abused. I am afraid. I am ashamed. And hearing back: So was I. So am I. Me-n Too. You are not alone.

That is what whole men need.
Not fixing. Finding.

An elder closed the weekend with this:

“The work works. Because of no work, the man was lost. Because of this work, the man was found. We find the man so our sons and daughters do not have to go through this. So they can become Found Sons and Daughters.”

My friend asked if therapy was enough.

It isn’t. But this weekend was not a replacement for therapy or medication nor meaningful friendships.  It was a room full of men finally using their inside voice. And the world, for that weekend at least, was a slightly safer place.

Between Thoughts – Intellectual Musings.
Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table..
Dr. Mzamo Masito