24/12/2025
SILENT DEATHS: THE HIDDEN STRUGGLES OF ZAMBIAN MEN – By Dr Aaron Mujajati
Every man is born into three families. The first is the one he is born into: his parents, his siblings, and his bloodline. The second is the one he creates with his wife and children. But there is a third family, often forgotten yet absolutely essential: the brothers he chooses to walk through life with.
Sadly, most men today are missing this last family, meaningful social connections with other men, and the consequences are visible everywhere.
Your parents may love you, but they are not in your fight. Your wife may love you deeply, but she cannot fully understand what it means to carry the weight of being a man every single day.
Every morning, when a man steps out of his house, he enters a battlefield. His family, his finances, his health, his faith, and sometimes even his sanity are under constant attack. Yet his duty remains unchanged: to provide and to protect.
But here lies the dilemma. If a man offloads his stress at home, peace does not follow. His wife begins to feel unsafe, and his children stop seeing him as strong. If he keeps it all inside, it eats him alive, leaving him to walk through life like a ghost, angry, desperate, and slowly dying.
This is why men need brothers. Not just acquaintances, but true friends who will stand by them in struggle. Men who will laugh with them, laugh at them when necessary, and call them out when they are being weak. Brothers who will help them fix their flaws, not just cover them up.
Only a man can truly understand the weight another man is carrying. Men who walk alone may appear strong on the outside, but inside they are crumbling. Without a brotherhood, a man is slowly dying.
Traditionally, we had the insaka, a sacred space where men gathered to share experiences, pass on wisdom, and teach boys what it truly means to be a man. It was in the insaka that men found strength, guidance, and accountability. But with modernisation and the adoption of Westernised social and religious practices, we lost this tradition. And in losing it, we created a void. Today, men are left to fend for themselves, isolated and burdened, without the support of a brotherhood and without a tribe.
It is time to reclaim what we have lost. Every man needs a band of brothers, a tribe of men who will fight for him and fight beside him. Men who will remind him that he is not alone in his struggles.
So, go out and make friends. Build connections with like-minded men. Create your own insaka if you must. Because without it, you are not just living, you are slowly dying. A man’s strength is not measured by how much he can carry alone, but by the brothers he chooses to carry life with.
