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Navigating masculinity in crisis: how Adolescence reflects modern male identity challenges

Two zulu warrior dancers.Graphic

21 Apr 2025

In our modern and urban world where boys have fewer clear role models from whom they can learn how to behave, Zulu culture and its community-spirited initiation processes have valuable lessons.

The latest buzz in TV town is the British series Adolescence, which pivots around a single gut-wrenching event: the brutal stabbing death of a young girl by her 13-year-old male classmate. It dredges all sorts of issues from the contemporary psychosocial quagmire teenagers are meant to negotiate on a daily basis.

The first issue is the insidious and psychologically devastating phenomenon of cyber and other forms of bullying. From the opening scene in which the police aggressively pounce on 13-year-old Jamie Miller, he is also herded into the victim fold. Somewhat nerdy but clever and industrious with an inquiring mind and an intact sense of humour, he nevertheless fails to slot into the prevailing view of what’s cool. And manly.

Like so many adolescent boys in turmoil, Jamie is forced to negotiate the minefield of supposed masculinity disseminated by social media. In this toxic landscape that insists on boys losing their virginity to prove their manhood even in prepubescence, he is verbally tortured as an “incel” (someone who is involuntarily celibate) and derided for breaking the “boys’ code”.

The series also levels a spotlight on the modern father-son dynamic. Jamie is portrayed as coming from a loving family. His mother is an endearing and caring parent and not particularly clingy.

But a constant unease envelops the household as she spends much of her time and energy appeasing the coiled tensions of her tightly wound husband – a decent and well-meaning man, who is himself a victim of toxic masculinity. Watching him flounder about in an acute sense of despair and defeat and self-doubt as the challenges head his way is an agonising process.

Read more: Adolescence is a technical masterpiece that exposes the darkest corners of incel culture and male rage

This male identity crisis has been rampant for nearly half a century (often pathetically blamed on the rise of feminism in more conservative circles). Men had lost their way, been stripped of their “essence” and their innate masculinity, and were being sucked into an unprecedented vortex of gender-based frustration and confusion. It’s been the general consensus ever since the macho masks, patriarchal posturing and traditional defences were peeled off by social circumstance.

As an astute young British journalist for GQ magazine in the 1990s put it: “We as modern men are brought up to be the strong, silent provider types while constantly coaxed by countless Cosmopolitan articles to be the sensitive, caring partners who can talk about their feelings and then finally rejected by most women who are still looking for a bastard to lose their hearts to.”

During the late 1980s and 1990s, California was awash with emaciated, down-beaten lentil- and muesli-fuelled males prancing about the forests and beating drums in sweat tents in an attempt to reawaken their long-dormant masculinity.

So-called mythopoetic authors such as Robert Bly and Sam Keen delved deeply into the reasons for this loss of essential malehood or manness. (Masculinity in this context, it must be noted, does not refer to macho-ness or traditional patriarchal traits, but rather an inherent psychic or spiritual male characteristic unique to the subspecies.)

Taking cues from Carl Jung, Bly postulated that young boys started losing their direction when men left their homes to work ever since the Industrial Revolution. In days of yore, he said, boys knew exactly who their dads were and what they did. They could see the sparks and smell the steel on the blacksmith or literally follow in their father’s footprints cleared through the powder on the bakery floor.

Birth of the absent father

Wonder Years to illustrate Boys to men The cast of the original 1988 TV series The Wonder Years. At the back are dad Jack Arnold (Dan Lauria), rebellious sister Karen (Olivia d’Abo) and mother Norma (Alley Mills), and in front are older brother Wayne (Jason Hervey) and 12-year-old Kevin (Fred Savage). (Photo: ABC)

Boys to men Robert Bly postulated that young boys started losing their direction after the Industrial Revolution. when men left their homes to work.

Boy being bullied to illustrate how boys aren't taught how to be men A cyber hell awaits children today as they are bullied to the point of extreme acts, including suicide and murder. (Photo: iStock)

Soon, however, dads everywhere simply disappeared shortly after sunrise and only came back after dark – eventually prompting a suspicion and mistrust in their offspring as to what exactly they were up to every day. And lo, the absent father – heavily burdened by his responsibility to sufficiently provide for his family in a tension-riddled corporate world, where he is subjected to a faux-father barking orders – was truly born.

While women were writhing, about to unshackle themselves from being seen as sex objects, men were forced into being success objects. And the children were left with the question: what exactly is it that you do, Daddy? Not an easy one to answer if you’re not a blacksmith or a baker, but a “semiprecious stones investment consultant” or any other insignificant prop in an even more sinister, vague or grotesque-sounding vocation.

There was a particularly poignant moment highlighting this in the series The Wonder Years – a Kodachrome glimpse into suburban America during the 1950s seen through the eyes of the patriarch’s young son. His father’s answer to the question of what he does for a living was blunt: “Shovel crap so you can eat.” The schism between father and son had long since surpassed the point of a mere physical void.

Read more: Popping the red pill: How toxic masculinity is reshaping young men’s identity online

At the other end of the spectrum, in Zulu culture boys are connected to their ancestors through the male line and a son is naturally drawn to “find” his father – or as the Zulu saying goes, “enter the kraal where the cattle of his father bellow”, according to late musician Johnny Clegg.

Clegg, who had grown up without his biological father, actively set out to find him when he came of age. During his search for a father figure as a boy, Johnny had immersed himself in Zulu culture and found a substitute in the collective subliminal force of Zulu masculinity. “These men were physically coded and psychically primed to exude a gender-exclusive energy they could all draw from,” he explained to me at his second home in the Msinga Valley in KwaZulu-Natal some years before his death.

Johnny Clegg and Juluka.

It is because they share ubukunzi – or bull spirit. And like the bull itself, it is a rogue, fiercely independent, even stubborn force that all men must strive to find in themselves and learn to control correctly.

If the ubukunzi is harnessed properly to make it work in harmony with the rest of the community, that individual can achieve the status of iqawe (regimental leader) or induna (chief). If not, he will be shinga – a renegade, possibly destructive element. But it is often also the shinga who make the best warriors, artists, poets and dancers…

There are several rites of passage before a Zulu boy can attain the rank of fully fledged impi. The first one is iphape – a reference to the sausage made from a cow’s lung. Threaded on a stick and warmed on hot rocks, it is a delicacy and prize for boys as young as five, who are taught the discipline of dlala nduku (stick fighting) in their quest to find and formulate their ubukunzi.

When they are about to come of age as amabungu (young warriors), they must perform a giya before the whole community. The giya is a sort of shadow-boxing bout against an imaginary opponent (or alter-ego) with the shield (isolihauw) and sticks (isquili, to attack, and uboko for defence). But it is also a statement of the young warrior’s status as a male member of the community, or his claim to be accepted as part of it.

During the fire the community will challenge this claim by taunting him and chanting his sometimes brutally honest list of nicknames afforded all Zulu men throughout their lives, which serve as a chronology of their personal histories.

Two zulu warrior dancers.Graphic

It can obviously be argued in today’s nonbinary, more gender-fluid world that this fundamental form of identification with their gender by Zulu men is not only dated, but dangerous. Given the track record of the Zulu, it’s not difficult to understand accusations that the ubukunzi in its collective form has not been properly reined in.

Young men being at home in their bodies and comfortable with their masculine selves in this context is perhaps more suitable to a tribal setting – but much of the original functionality of coming to terms with their ubukunzi has also been stripped away by urban living. A fresh set of demands in a Western industrialised environment doesn’t allow for proper checks and balances and the shinga in such men are often more likely to surface.

In the interim, young boys and men of the so-called Western world still have to face the onslaught of the cyber hell they inhabit. Here, no manner of bullness or bullishness or spear rattling will save them from the systematic, insidious corrosion of their sense of self presented by social media terrorism.

Perhaps the secret to success for men is compromise. But it’s going to take some time for men to negotiate a middle path between the confused reality of the Jamie Millers of this world and the traditional ways in which men in tribal cultures are physically, mentally and spiritually fortified against the onslaught of life. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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Birth of the absent father