There Are No Handouts
One of the toughest places for a man to navigate his prejudices and masculinity is right after he leaves the relative comfort of secondary school. This is when he realizes that academically, he will eventually come good but socially, he will never receive pizza on a Friday night and a new iPhone just because he’s handsome.
Nobody is talking to him about the grey area of life after school and day one of starting a job or a business. He’s figuring things out on his own.
Left to his own devices, he’s forming a view of the world he’s aspired to but without the steady hands of those that may know better.
This is when Derrick either becomes a man with an appetite for or aversion to the food, women, cars, finances and factors that shape him later in life. And nobody is paying him any attention.
Probably because his father, now past middle age, is preoccupied with problems like standing for two minutes in front of a nightclub urinal before his bladder unlocks the pee.
His father or uncles are spending time and money trying to salvage the dying flame of their heyday, sitting for 30 minutes in a barbershop waiting for the black hair dye to dry.
They’re opening TikTok accounts and dancing for their followers. Their wrinkly thumbs accidentally sending compromising photos to the church or ExCo WhatsApp group.
That’s what young men’s mentors are busy with.
So the young man finds his way around, on his own and discovers some harsh truths.
His all-male boarding house is a precursor of his predicament. There are no boxes of pizza or iPhones lying around. No carrier bags from Mud Boutique or Foschini. Just hardship all round.
Saturday afternoons are spent vacuously playing Aviator with a 10 kwacha because there are no tinted VXs, Mercedes or Mark Xs pulling up in the car park to drive for a chill in Kaftown, Chongwe or Siavonga.
Sure, there are outliers that are in their burgeoning years as a Mario or Ben 10. They’re already manipulating the system but the majority of young men in the years after completing school, going to uni and starting a job or business are in a social and economic tunnel with no light but more tunnel at the end.
Their mentors are dating their classmates, their friends are drinking and smoking the anxiety away while their mothers and aunties have zero knowledge of life as a broke, sexless and unguided missile.
And that is where we have a lot of work to do. To ditch the Saturday afternoon pumping our bellies with lager and take a younger man for a drive instead of his double-breasted classmate.
Tell him that you’ve been through what he’s going through and that life is unkind and merciless to anyone waiting for a saviour in a VX.
