Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

My mother’s WhatsApp poster, Older Persons Week, and why a South African man is “senior” long before the law says so.

My mother, Ndileka,  is 72 years old. During Older Persons Week she dropped an image into our family WhatsApp group: a bright, crowded poster of smiling grandparents, numbered lists, a piggy bank, and a rubbish bin stuffed with papers labelled PAST, COMPLAINTS and HURTS. Underneath, her instruction: these tips are not only for old people. They apply to all of you. Most of the people in that group are past forty. Some of us are past fifty. Nobody argued. In our family you do not argue with Mama in the group chat. You react with a heart and you reflect in private. This is my private reflection, made public.

A confession first. My ignorance is infinite. I did not know much about Older Persons Week. I had to look it up, and what I found turned a cheerful poster into an uncomfortable piece of arithmetic.

What the week is, and who the law says is old.
South Africa commemorates Older Persons Week every year from 26 September to 2 October, to honour older people and to raise awareness of the issues that affect them. The celebrations do not stop on 2 October. The whole of October runs as Senior Citizens Month, sitting on top of the United Nations’ International Day of Older Persons on 1 October. The legal line matters, so let me be precise. The amendment to the Older Persons Act introduces a uniform definition: an older person is someone aged 60 or older. It also strengthens measures against abuse and ageism, and provides for temporary safe care when an older person is at risk. So, by law, I am not a senior. At 52, the Joburg Zoo will charge me full price. My mother walks in free. Hold that thought, because the body keeps a different calendar from the statute book.

Mahala and discounted this October (bring your ID)
– Johannesburg Zoo: free entry for anyone 60 and older for the whole of October 2026. On Thursday 22 October, the R22-on-the-22nd special lets grandchildren and family in for R22 while seniors still enter free. On Tuesday 27 October from 9am there is a seniors’ celebration with #67Blankets under the tree canopy, with a shuttle inside the zoo.
– Ster-Kinekor: 60-plus get 22% off all ticket types, except Tuesdays, when everybody pays half price anyway.
– Spur: a dedicated pensioners’ menu at participating restaurants. Days and prices vary by outlet, so phone your local Spur before you go.
– Kirstenbosch (if you are going down to the Cape): South African residents over 60 get in free on Tuesdays, except public holidays. Several other Cape Town landmarks advertise pensioner rates too; confirm current terms before you travel.

The arithmetic the law ignores.
Here is what turned the poster from cute to urgent. Stats SA’s 2026 mid-year population estimates put life expectancy at birth at 65.5 years for men and 71.0 years for women. Half of 65 is about 32 and a half. If a South African man’s life were a football match, half-time arrives at 32. That is where our midlife crisis lives, not at 45 with a red sports car. Zoom out to the continent and the picture holds. Average life expectancy across Africa is roughly 64 years, against a global average of roughly 73. And the number that matters most is not how long we live but how long we live well. The World Health Organization’s estimate of healthy life expectancy for South African men sits in the low fifties. Subtract one from the other and the average South African man spends his last thirteen or more years sick, medicated, or both.
A behavioural scientist owes you a caveat here. Life expectancy at birth is not a personal forecast. It is an average dragged down by deaths of infants and, in our case especially, of homicide, violent deaths that kill  young men, women, children, dogs, cats and plants.  A man who reaches 60 can expect more years than the headline number. But read that caveat slowly. It is not comfort. It is an indictment. Our average is low because so many of our brothers never reach 40.

In this country the law makes you a senior at 60. The body makes a South African man a senior at 45. Plan for the body, not the law.
So when I say anyone in Africa above 40 or 45 is a senior, I do not mean it as a legal definition. I mean it as a planning assumption. Treat your body at 45 the way the law treats your mother at 60: with protection, with priority, and with regular check-ups. The poster itself agrees with me, by the way. The top says 50 to 90 years. The bottom asks whether you have friends aged 47 to 90. Even the poster’s author kept lowering the age.

What actually kills us: correcting my own sentence.
For years I have said, in talks and in men’s circles, that very few South African men die of natural causes. The death registers forced me to fix that sentence. In Stats SA’s classification, dying of a disease is dying of natural causes. And most of us do. What we rarely die of is old age.
The most recent cause-of-death report (deaths in 2023) shows nearly 60% of all deaths came from non-communicable diseases. The top three causes overall were diabetes, cerebrovascular disease (strokes) and hypertensive disease. For men, the single leading cause was tuberculosis. Men made up 53.5% of all deaths, the widest gender gap in the series. Then the other column, the one my old list left out. Non-natural causes, meaning violence, road crashes and other injuries, account for 19.6% of male deaths against 5.9% of female deaths. Among men aged 15 to 29, 59.1% of deaths are non-natural. One in five of us does not get the luxury of a chronic disease. We are taken by a bullet, a knife, a taxi, a bottle and a steering wheel. And HIV has not left the room. About 7.8 million South Africans live with HIV, and AIDS-related deaths are still close to one in seven of all deaths in the country.
Natural causes is not the same as a peaceful death. Most of us die naturally. Very few of us die of old age.

Much of the chronic column flows from one place, and every township auntie can point to it: umkhaba. Visceral fat, the hard belly that sits around the organs rather than under the skin, feeds insulin resistance, raised blood pressure, strokes and heart disease. The belly is not a sign of a man who is eating well. It is a slow invoice.

Reading Mama’s poster with a behavioural and social scientist’s eye.
The poster circulating in our group is credited to a “Dr. Lushilu Health Series” and a “Dr. Gilbert Mukuka.” I could not trace either. That does not make it wrong. It means it deserves what any forwarded wisdom deserves: respect for the intention, and a check on the content. The WhatsApp group is our new village fire. The elders still speak there. We still have to test what is said around it. (I made the same argument in Diagnosis by Group Chat.) Most of it is sound. Reduce salt, sugar, white flour and processed food. Eat vegetables, lentils, legumes, fruit. Drink water before you are thirsty, which matters more with age, because the thirst signal weakens as we get older. Rest before you are exhausted. Get check-ups before you fall sick. Don’t sit in one place for too long. Listen to others. Look after family, friends and a clean home. Save for tough times. If every man over 40 in my family followed only those lines, our average would move.

Four lines I would adjust, gently, because Mama sent it:
– “Reduce dairy products.” I would say reduce sugary dairy: flavoured milk, ice cream, sweetened yoghurt. Plain milk, amasi and plain yoghurt are among the cheapest sources of protein and calcium we have, and older bodies lose muscle every year they are not fed and loaded. Unless you are lactose intolerant or your doctor says otherwise, keep the amasi.
– “Forget your age.” As an attitude, yes. As health policy, no. Your age is the reason for your screening calendar. Forget it in spirit; remember it at the clinic.
– “Swallow your sorrows” and “forget the hurts caused by relatives.” This is the line I would rewrite. James Gross’s research on emotion regulation separates reappraisal (changing how you read a situation) from suppression (holding the feeling down), and suppression carries costs: it does not reduce the feeling and it strains the body and our relationships. And we cannot forget on command; Wegner’s white bear taught us that. The better instruction is: say it to someone who can hold it, make sense of it, then release it. Process first, then let go.
– “Reduce arguments and unnecessary disputes.” Right, and the science is stronger than the poster knows. In Janice Kiecolt-Glaser’s studies, couples with more hostile marital interactions healed small wounds more slowly. Conflict is a health variable. But reducing arguments must not mean swallowing them. It means fighting right (read Gootman’s book – Fight Right),  which I wrote about in I Run Before They Run Me.

Why men will read this and change nothing?
I know my audience because I am my audience. We read a poster like this, react with a thumbs-up, and carry on. Three forces keep us there. First, precarious manhood: a man’s status is felt as something that can be lost, and a clinic queue feels like a place where you lose it (Ubudoda Abukhulelwa). Second, the cultural script that a wounded man must not be seen or laughed at, inxeba lendoda alihlekwa, so we hide symptoms until they become emergencies. Third, plain present bias: the steak is today, the stroke is “someday.” Behavioural science’s answer is not to shout louder. It is to make the healthy action the default, attach it to a date you already keep, and do it with someone. That is why the protocol below ties the check-up to your birthday, and why the closing ask is a family one.

To the 40 plus year old – Niyazazi: the 21st key.
To those 40 year olds plus, with babies under a year, or children under 18: niyazazi. We need to do more. Not so that we can be admired, but so that we can be present when our child turns 21 and we hand over the key. Whatever 21st key you can afford, gold-plated or cardboard, the real gift is you, standing up, unassisted, to give it.

The 21st Key Arithmetic.
Your age today + (21 − your child’s age today) = the age you must reach, still functioning.
– A man of 45 with a newborn must reach 66. That is past the male average of 65.5.
– A man of 52 with a ten-year-old must reach 63. That is a decade beyond the healthy-life estimate for South African men.
– A man of 38 with a three-year-old must reach 56. Easier on paper, harder if umkhaba is already on the table.
If your number sits beyond the averages, the averages are not your destiny. They are your workload.

Njengesela (like a thief): lock the doors.
Death is coming like a thief, for everyone, fit or unfit. Fit men die young. Unfit men sometimes outlive the doctors who warned them. Health does not buy immunity. It buys odds. A thief does not choose the house with the strongest door; he chooses the house with the open window. Our job is not to defeat death. It is to stop leaving the windows open, to make death work hard for the job instead of giving it easy chances.

The Isela Audit: seven locks for anyone over 40.
1. Know your numbers every year, on your birthday. Blood pressure, blood glucose (or HbA1c), cholesterol and waist. Book the test in the same week you buy the cake.
2. Keep your waist under half your height. A 1.80m man wants a waist under 90cm. A tape measure is cheaper than a stent.

3. Know your HIV status and respect a long cough. Test, and if positive, stay on treatment. A cough beyond two weeks is a TB question, not a winter story.
4. Have the prostate conversation early. Raise screening with your doctor at 40 to 45. Embarrassment is not a medical condition; prostate cancer is.
5. Move daily and break the sitting. Walk, run, push, pull, lift, dance. Stand up every 30 to 60 minutes. (See Koze Kubenini? for the full rant.)
6. Water before thirst, rest before exhaustion. Mama’s poster got this one exactly right.
7. Don’t swallow; speak. Call one friend every week and say one true thing. Strong relationships are among the best-evidenced predictors of survival we have (Holt-Lunstad’s meta-analyses, which I leaned on in The Twenty Percent Life).

This October: #TakeYourParent.
In The Gladiators for the Have Lots I made the case for #TakeYourChild: take the young ones to the places that shape them. This month, turn it around. Take your parent. Take your grandmother. Take the uncle who raised you when your father did not. Take them to the zoo on a weekday when it is quiet, with their ID in their pocket. Go on the 22nd and pay R22 for the grandchildren. Catch a morning movie at the pensioner rate. Sit with them at the Spur and let them order from their own menu. And while you are sitting there, ask them the questions only they can answer: what their own parents died of, at what age, and what they wish they had known at your age. Family health history is free data, and it expires.

Mama Ndileka  was right.
My mother did not send that poster to the seniors in the group. She sent it to all of us. She is 72. She has lived long enough to watch the averages play out on real people. Her instruction was not a lecture. It was a mother doing what the elders have always done: noticing the open windows in the house and telling her children before the thief does.

Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. I am because she is still here to send the poster. And I intend to be here when my own children forward me the next one, roll their eyes, and say, “Tata, these apply to you too.” My name is Mzamo. It means try. I will try. Lock your doors with me.

Sources and notes
– South African Government, Older Persons Week (26 September to 2 October), gov.za.
– Lifestyle & Tech (23 September 2026), on the Older Persons Act amendment introducing a uniform 60+ definition.
– TimesLIVE, Time Out Johannesburg and Scrolla.Africa (1–4 October 2026), Johannesburg City Parks and Zoo free entry for seniors in October 2026, R22 special on 22 October and #67Blankets event on 27 October.
– Ster-Kinekor seniors’ promotion (60+: 22% off all ticket types except Tuesdays), as listed by the V&A Waterfront and pensioner-deal sites.
IOL (30 September 2026), free and discounted activities for pensioners in Cape Town, including Kirstenbosch free Tuesdays for SA residents over 60.
– Statistics South Africa, Mid-year population estimates 2026 (P0302): life expectancy at birth 65.5 (male) and 71.0 (female); ~7.8 million people living with HIV; AIDS-related deaths 13.9% of deaths.
Statistics South Africa, Mortality and causes of death in South Africa, 2023 (P0309.3), as reported: leading causes, TB as leading male cause, 19.6% male vs 5.9% female non-natural deaths, 59.1% of male deaths aged 15–29 non-natural.
– Healthy life expectancy: WHO Global Health Observatory estimates for South Africa (men in the low fifties); continental and global life expectancy from UN World Population Prospects (approximate).
– Gross, J. J. on reappraisal vs suppression; Wegner, D. M. on thought suppression; Kiecolt-Glaser, J. K. et al. on hostile marital interactions and wound healing; Holt-Lunstad, J. et al. on social relationships and mortality.
– Waist-to-height guidance (keep waist below half your height) follows UK NICE guidance (2022).
– The poster shared in the family group is a forwarded WhatsApp image; its stated authors could not be verified.
==========================

Dr. Mzamo Masito

Between Thoughts- Intellectual Musings.

Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table.