It was a day that we all knew would come. The day when the owners of the land of Fanta Citron, the shantytown of Mvog-Ada in Yaoundé, Cameroon, where I grew up, were going to take back what belonged to them. We all knew it in the neighborhood, but no one was prepared for it. There had been warnings in the past, but the family of my mother, like most of the neighbors, had opted for the ostrich policy of sticking their head in the sand and ignoring the problem, hoping it would go away.
There had been several meetings between each of the families and the landowners. The landowners wanted to sell their land to the highest bidder. They had received offers from wealthy businessmen who felt that the neighborhood, given its proximity to the city center and to other vibrant neighborhoods, was commercially attractive. My mother and her siblings were offered a percentage of the sale proceeds of the land where their house was built. This generous offer was intended to eliminate any resistance they might have. My family had a few weeks to decide.
“No, no, no. Not so fast,” Uncle Bisseau, the eldest, proclaimed at the first family gathering, to discuss what they were going to do. “It’s a no, we’re not going to leave.”
He looked around the room, resting his gaze on each of his siblings. There was something frightening in his eyes. It was done on purpose. He wanted to silence any dissonant voices.
“I say, we take the money,” Uncle Etoundi intervened, visibly not intimidated by his elder brother’s gravitas. “We’ll be able to take care of our children with that money and build small houses in the village. I’m ready to go back to the village. We don’t belong here.”
Their village was less than 30 kilometers from Yaoundé, the capital.
The two older brothers were on opposite sides. It was a much-feared confrontation, because the others had to pick a side.
“Sister, I’ll take the money,” I overheard my mother tell Auntie Blandine. “We can finally leave Fanta Citron, start afresh. We can leave the bad luck behind us.”
Auntie Blandine remained pensive.
“Sister, everything is changing," said my mother. "Look at Crescence. When she left this poor neighborhood, she met her future husband. Maybe we should do the same. Sister, we have to leave.”
Auntie Blandine was apathetic.
“I don’t want to leave,” Auntie Blandine finally answered, tears in her eyes. “I’ve only known Fanta Citron my whole life. All my bearings are here. Everything I know is here. I can’t, I can’t.”
For the first time since I had known them, my mother and Auntie Blandine were not on the same side. The “inseparables” as they were called by everyone, were on the verge of separating.
My mother was devastated. She knew her sister’s attachment to this shantytown that had welcomed their joys and their sorrows, their laughter and their tears, their children. But she probably thought she could change her mind.
In the end, only my mother, Uncle Etoundi and Auntie Juliette, who had left the neighborhood shortly before getting married, were in favor of taking the money and leaving.
At the time, like the rest of the country, my childhood neighborhood was at a turning point. The cyber cafés sprouting up downtown were ushering the population into the technological age, an age that would break down social barriers, shatter traditions and transform the country as we knew it. It was the advent of the famous global village that was talked about in every news program on the radio. By offering them immediate leave for a nice windfall, the landowners seemed to be giving the residents of my shantytown a much-needed opportunity to participate in this new world. My family needed it.
But entering the new world also meant people leaving the old behind and losing their bearings. Auntie Blandine, Uncle Bisseau, and the rest of the family were conflicted in this new world that was taking shape. They did not want to miss out, but they didn’t want to give up their past either. Leaving Fanta Citron felt like erasing their history. They thought they could be part of the new world while still living there, believing it would help them participate in it. They were shaken by this new world. Fanta Citron seemed to be the anchor they needed to avoid being swept away. Asking them to leave felt like throwing them into the unknown.
My neighborhood, my family, the country, all were in crisis. A crisis that was shaking even the strongest alliances like the one of my mother and Auntie Blandine, despite their deep bond. Modernity v. The Past, some might say.
There is a similar crisis that is currently shaking men. On the surface, it manifests in the continued decline of men in college enrollment, their decreasing presence in white-collar jobs, rising unemployment rates, and increasing suicide rates. Additionally, more men are turning to niche social media platforms, where influencers celebrating pre-sexual revolution masculinity are gaining popularity (a time that changed norms around marriage and ushered in sexual freedom). There is also a rise in loneliness, among other issues. This crisis is disrupting natural and traditional alliances, as I observed just a few days ago in Slidell, Louisiana, a half-hour drive northeast of New Orleans, during a discussion with Black cowboys who are members of the Buffalo Soldiers, a club of horsemen and horsewomen of color. What is a man? What is masculinity? Are there clearly defined roles between men and women? How do we solve the current crisis?
“Being a man today is a little hard,” said Larry Overton, 32, who has a ranch, Overton Estates, which he started building in 2018 in the small town of Greensburg, LA. It is “like learning that everything that you’ve been taught is not right, and that you have to develop and mature and find your own path.”
Eugene Runless, 53, who recently retired from Southern University, believes that a man works with his hands, like men of his generation and the generations before him.
“When I was younger, a man would take care of his family, get up and work hard, raise his kids, right? Now, we’ve become complacent. It all seems too easy. Therefore, younger generations are not much of go-getters like we used to be,” he laments.
“I call it hustling. That’s what I feel a man should do and I think that’s what he used to do,” said Runless, who brought his grandson with him that day to teach him about hard work. He said he started manual work when he was nine.
On this rainy January day, Larry and Eugene were at the stall barn, where Eugene, a farrier, was shoeing the horses of the Buffalo Soldiers. They were supposed to participate in the Martin Luther King Day parade on January 20 in New Orleans, but the event was canceled due to the exceptionally freezing weather. Five men and one woman were busy at the stable, cleaning, feeding the horses, brushing their coats, and spending time with their animals until it was their turn to be tended to by Eugene.
Seen from the outside, cowboys are often perceived as a man’s world, and for many, even a white man’s world — one of the few spaces that still remains a male stronghold. Among the Buffalo Soldiers, a name derived from the two all-Black mounted cavalry regiments that served in the Union Army during the Civil War, there exists a generational divide when it comes to views on masculinity. Those under thirty-five share a similar perspective on what it means to be a man, while the older generation identifies as “old school,” wanting society to place men at the forefront. Much like the crisis my family faced decades ago, some might frame this as the modern man versus the caveman; forward-thinking versus traditional.
I spoke to my cowboy bros individually.
For the younger generation, masculinity is what you make of it. It is choosing your own path by freeing yourself from stereotypes that society imposes on you. It is forging your own values and refusing to be boxed in. It takes time to get there, as Leon Leland, 32, found out. He said he discovered what kind of man he was only in the past 2 years.
“I am honest, truthful, very expressive, very bold, very confident. I am aware. I am spiritual, I am loving. I am all the things I desire to be for myself before anyone else,” says Leland, adding that “no superhero cape on, no nothing.”
“The advocates of the ‘real men’ might say you are too soft, even that you are too weak,” I challenged him.
“If you allow others to determine what is weakness or what is masculinity or what is softness, you’re always going to be judged by their standards, not your own,” Leland quipped.
Leland, like Overton, doesn’t define a man — or himself — by physicality or appearance.
My young cowboy bros say that they also have to shake off the weight of racism, which is especially oppressive in the conservative Deep South. According to them, this manifests in the fact that White men command and receive respect, while Black men are forced to fight daily for their dignity. On top of this, the equestrian world regularly discriminates against and humiliates them, making it clear that they are not welcome or don’t belong. This creates a divide between two categories of men: White men and everyone else. Masculinity, then, becomes defined by what White men say it is, rooted in racial and economic inequalities. Being a man means being successful, someone other men should aspire to emulate.
“It’s not easy for us to demonstrate masculinity,” said Chamar, 28, explaining that being turned down constantly while looking for jobs, along with being ghosted by recruiters and companies, has made him question himself as a man.
“They want a certain type of people,” Chamar, who is a horse trainer, said with resignation. For him, if you are White and you have money and power, you are seen as a man and a symbol of masculinity.
He said, for example, that if he were to sell a horse that he has trained, he might get $5,000. But if a White man were to sell the same horse, he might get 6 times that amount.
I asked Lance Sumler, 32, if he had a son, whether he would urge him to protect his family, one of the missions a man must fulfill, according to influencers of masculinity.
“If you decide to take that path and you grow up as a man who gets married and has kids one day, it is your job to protect your family. I do believe that,” he responded. “But that doesn’t mean that your partner, who might not be a woman, cannot equally contribute to protecting the family as well.”
He continued: “Sometimes, when people think about protecting the family, they think about guns. They think fighting. This is rarely the case. Protecting your family means that there’s food on the table every day. Protecting your family means all kinds of things. It means going to your child’s school, going to a parent-teacher conference. It means paying attention, making sure that you’re raising a respectable, you know, young adult. It means spending time together as a family. It means talking at the dinner table, communicating. All that is involved in, you know, protecting your family.”
For my older cowboy bros, real men and masculinity are gone. They are dead. According to them, the fault lies with tech and the internet, which have replaced a culture of effort and hard work with one of laziness and ease. Men are synonymous to physicality, grind, rawness, roughness, and toughness. It can be summed up by the cliché “Boys don’t cry.”
“Complacency, electronics, air conditioning, we stay in the house,” Runless explained. “Hard times make good and strong men. Now things come too easy.”
“Does it mean that men have become weak and soft?” I asked him.
“Masculine men work with their hands. Young generations don’t work with their hands anymore,” Runless responded, lamenting that many young men have ceded their leadership to women.
He gave the example of a couple with two children, where the wife earns more than the husband, and he has fully relinquished his responsibilities as a husband and father because of her higher income, effectively making her the head of the family. Even in this scenario, for Runless, the man can still remain the head of the family by asserting his leadership in raising the children and managing household responsibilities. “You can easily play several different roles, but instead, you just take a back seat and let the woman be the leader. I don’t think the woman should be the leader. She should be supportive of the man,” he explained.
Brandon Irving, 46, was frustrated. He was frustrated with the man-bun — a type of ponytail — that many young men have. He was frustrated that young girls show too much skin. He was frustrated that young kids have access to music that should only be played in a nightclub. He was nostalgic of the time when kids were given “structure.”
“I used to think for the longest time that my dad was the devil,” he told me. “My father was a chief operator at a refinery in Southfield, LA. He made very good money. He told me, ‘You’re going to earn your money. I don’t give you nothing. I provide food and shelter, clothes, shoes. You go get a job, you cut grass. You’re going to make it on your own,’” he recalled.
He feels that he was given structure. He was taught to work hard. He didn’t get anything for free.
“There is no more structure,” he said, seemingly saying that by changing society, we are changing men. It destroys what made men masculine.
Irvine’s and Runless’ version of masculinity is driven by nostalgia, because, back then, “hard-working” was a word associated with Black men, as Runless told me. Today, Latinos have that title, he said.
To resolve the current crisis, Runless and Irving believe that it is important to realign genders with their traditional roles, something that is often seen as misogynistic and reinforcing patriarchy. Both assert that they are not politically correct, which they consider a trait of “real men.” They claim they are neither insecure nor frightened by modernity or the emergence of strong women.
“If you have structure, and a woman is raised as a woman, she’s gonna understand that she’s supposed to lean on the man [who] is the head of the household. They say that in the Bible, the man is the head of the household,” Irving said.
Going back to past paradigms of gender roles would restore men’s masculinity, Runless suggests.
“I don’t think a woman should be in a masculine position,” he said, referring to professional women. “She should know how to take care of her home. She should know how to raise her children. She should know how to sow. She should know how to bake and let the husband go to work and provide. There’s nothing wrong with the reverse, but she should understand these basic principles on how to be successful in society, especially if she plans to have a family.”
“You are aware that your position is in direct support of patriarchy and is backward-looking?” I pushed back.
“I’m brutally honest,” Runless said, while Irving told me “I’m old school. I ain’t got no corners to cut.”
My younger cowboy bros do not share these stereotypical gender roles. For them, the time when the man ruled with authority over the couple and the household is over. However, some believe that discipline must be reintroduced.
“My grandmother was afraid of my grandfather,” Overton said. “I don’t think people should be afraid of their spouse. Fear is not leadership. ‘Do as I say’ doesn’t work anymore.”
He has nevertheless implemented a one-word code for visitors of his ranch: discipline. “They can’t have their pants sagging. They have to carry themselves with respect. You can take discipline and move it to any part of your life, right? financial relationships, school, anything.”
One thing that is fueling the crisis among Black men is mental health, because “we carry too much,” Leland and Sumler said.
"There is a lot of mental work to do with just being able to sit with yourself and actually dissect all of those ideas, those thoughts, those toxic things, to actually better ourselves,” Leland said, asking for more resources to deal with mental health.
There is no doubt that for my cowboy bros, men are currently going through a crisis. During the Presidential campaign, Vice President J.D Vance voiced some of the men’s issues. My older cowboy bros have been lamenting for a long time that young men were no longer masculine. Vance simply said out loud what they thought in silence.
My conversations with my Black cowboy bros’ show a diversity of points of view, which suggests that there is not just one solution. Not all men think that men were better off in the past, or that today’s man is better than the man of yesterday.
Society has changed at a speed that many men have not been able to keep up with. This change seems to be going in one direction: men must change. They must evolve. This imperative gives some men the impression that the change that has occurred is against them. They feel targeted. They retreat and find themselves on the defensive.
Decades ago, offering us a percentage from the sale of the land that we occupied for free, was seen as an offer my family could not refuse. But as the landowners discovered, even a positive outcome for all is viewed differently, because it affects each individual differently. My mother and Auntie Blandine were inseparable until that offer.
Resolving this crisis will not be easy. Republican Senator Josh Hawley suggested that young men “turn off the computer, log off the porn, and go ask a real woman on a date.” Many emphasize the importance of preserving the institution of traditional marriage. But urging men to date more or forcing them to remain in unhappy marriages is not a solution either.
We must start by recreating and reweaving social connections. This would help to break the isolation of many men. We must also invest in mental health and remove the stigma of asking for help.
Furthermore, we should codify human relationships less, leaving a room for spontaneity. Finally, it is crucial that we take the time to listen, rather than immediately reacting when a man expresses a traditional view that challenges or bothers us. We need to stop overreacting and create space for open dialogue, allowing men to express their thoughts and feelings, restoring their confidence in the process. Progress and change are as good as the time and space we give people to understand and adjust to them.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Luc Olinga's work on Medium.