Being a man is such hard work!

 

WHEN I was growing up, one of my most passionate fancies was to be a soldier. The fascination stretched into adolescent and a little beyond.

 

I would see soldiers in their camouflage uniforms and go like eh maama! Whenever truckloads of army men (there was a time when all Ugandan soldiers were male) drove by our home, my jaw would drop, till it needed external support. I idolised the military. I envied them their apparent invincibility. I thought life started and ended with soldiers…

 

Well, at least I was partly right on this one. What I didn’t figure was, soldiering was a lot more than wearing the military fatigues and carrying those AK-47 and G-3 guns.

 

Being a man is like that. People see the macho outlook, the suave or rough deportment, smell the masculine fragrance or stink (depending on upbringing) and think: That guy is a man. They see the Casanova go about his philandering ways, see the effeminate guy amble about like a sissy, or the ruffian plod through town wearing an I-don’t-give-a-hoot kind of mien, and think: There goes a man. 

 

In the African setting, folks will see a bereaved widower go about carrying logs to light the bonfire, where the average widow would be expected to sit in a corner in the room where her deceased husband is lying in state, looking on with blank eyes and wet nose; and say: There is a strong man. 

 

They will see the jilted lover driving to the office on the morning after he was dumped, where his female counterpart would be coiled up on her unmade bed like a famished cat, meowing into her phone as she tells her friend or mother how terrible the world can get; and think: There goes a senseless man. And many other scenarios.

But that is not the man. That is not the real man.

 

The man you don’t see is the one who was raised on the dictum: Men don’t cry. Be a man. He knocks his toe on a stump as he rushes to the well to fetch water, blood gushing out like water from a tap, and he is told: Hey, don’t cry, men don’t cry.

 

His mother passes on and, alongside his sisters, aunts and village women, he is wailing his agonised heart out, and his deceased mother’s friend takes him aside and admonishes: Mubiru, be strong for your sisters. Now if you cry like that, what will they do? So you bottle up.

 

The man is that fellow who, even when he loses his appetite due to pressure at work, or because he had a piece of carrot cake late in the day, after tight schedules made him skip lunch, is not allowed to miss supper, because his missus is bound to ask: Where did you eat? You see, the man owes it to his wife to eat the food she has cooked (or got her house help to cook). It’s part of his approval of her role as wife.

 

The man is that fellow who, though he was raised in a fearsome environment where it was unsafe to get out of the house beyond 8:00pm, is still expected to fight off all life-threatening situations when his family (read wife and children) feel attacked. He cannot say, ‘but see, I too am scared’. He is the man, and men cannot be eaten by bears or hacked by robbers.

 

The way men are raised, it seems like it’s their lot to grow faster into men than into human beings with emotions and weaknesses. They are expected to be all muscle and testosterone, so that when danger lurks by, he attacks and when there are females, he wears the coat of a peacock and the armour of a knight.

 

Nobody expects a man to show his human side, because eh, that is not manly! But as one sympathetic female just mentioned to me, “if it is any consolation, as opposed to a sissy, a masculine man will always, always win a woman’s heart when he puts in a bid for it.”