Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe's crisis is existential in the most literal sense. When inflation reached 79.6 billion percent, money itself became meaningless — and with it, the masculine identity of every man whose worth was measured in what he could provide. Men carried wheelbarrows of banknotes to buy bread, and the absurdity wasn't funny — it was an assault on masculine dignity that the culture processed through dark humor and alcohol because there was no other framework available.

The diaspora dimension is critical: Zimbabwean men in South Africa face xenophobic violence that specifically targets foreign African men. Men in the UK — many of them highly educated — work as care assistants and warehouse operatives, experiencing a professional demotion that their Shona concept of unhu (human dignity) makes particularly painful. The men who stayed in Zimbabwe under Mugabe and now Mnangagwa navigate a surveillance state where political expression is dangerous and economic initiative is constrained by party loyalty. The war veterans — men who fought the liberation war — were used as political tools during the land reform era and then discarded, receiving neither the farms they were promised nor the psychological support they needed for the trauma of a guerrilla war fought in their youth.