Mzamo Masito’s This Country Hates Our Boys enters a South African public discourse that is deeply fraught. At a moment marked by persistent gender-based violence, moral panic about black masculinity, and growing concern over boys’ educational and social outcomes, Masito attempts to recentre the figure of the black and Coloured boy as a subject of care rather than suspicion. The book’s opening provocation, “I do not hate boys, I hate men,” is intended to signal a moral distinction between innocence and culpability, between those who are failed by society and those who have allegedly failed it. In doing so, Masito seeks to interrupt what he describes as a national habit of collective male guilt and to reframe conversations about violence, abandonment and social breakdown through the lens of boyhood neglect.
At its core, the book raises an important and necessary concern: South African boys, particularly black and coloured boys, are growing up unseen, unheard and structurally abandoned. Masito draws attention to the affective and material conditions that shape this abandonment, most notably father absence, emotional neglect and social disinvestment. He argues that when boys grow up “unhealed”, they do not simply disappear but emerge as men carrying rage, addiction, shame and unresolved pain. In classrooms, courtrooms and caskets, the consequences of this neglect are made visible. This framing resonates strongly within a context where boys’ vulnerabilities are often overshadowed by a singular focus on male violence, without adequate attention to how such violence is produced over time.
Masito’s insistence that one “cannot heal a country while pretending its boys do not bleed” speaks to a broader critique of development, policy and feminist discourses that have, at times, struggled to hold boys’ vulnerability alongside girls’ oppression. In this sense, This Country Hates Our Boys performs an important discursive intervention: it refuses the erasure of boys’ suffering and demands that they be taken seriously as subjects of social repair. However, while the book succeeds in foregrounding the urgency of boys’ pain, it ultimately falters in its analytical framing of gender, power and patriarchy. The central weakness of Masito’s argument lies not in what it names, but in what it misunderstands, collapses, or leaves structurally unexplored.
One of the most persistent conceptual problems in the text is the equation of misogyny with misandry. By framing critiques of men and masculinity as forms of hatred equivalent to misogyny, the book flattens asymmetrical power relations into moral equivalence. Misogyny is not merely interpersonal dislike; it is a structural system embedded in law, culture, economy and social reproduction. To treat it as interchangeable with misandry obscures the gendered distribution of power and violence in South African society. This slippage becomes particularly troubling when critiques of men’s violence are read as “bashing” rather than as political and feminist interventions aimed at dismantling harm.
By framing critiques of men and masculinity as forms of hatred equivalent to misogyny, the book flattens asymmetrical power relations into moral equivalence
Closely related to this is the book’s repeated failure to meaningfully theorise institutional patriarchy. Patriarchy is named throughout the text, yet it appears less as a historically produced system of power and more as a diffuse moral condition, something that simply exists, rather than something that is actively designed, maintained and reproduced. In some instances, Masito turns to religious or spiritual framing to explain patriarchy’s persistence, presenting it as an almost metaphysical force rather than a political structure. This move inadvertently depoliticises patriarchy, detaching it from institutions such as the state, the labour market, the family, education and the criminal justice system. As a result, patriarchy is rendered analytically vague and politically toothless.
This vagueness becomes especially apparent in the claim that patriarchy is an “equal pain provider”. While it is true that patriarchy produces harm for men, particularly through rigid masculine norms that punish vulnerability, it does not do so equally. Feminist scholarship, both globally and within South Africa, has long demonstrated that patriarchy distributes harm unevenly, privileging men as a group while differentially harming women, gender-diverse people, and marginalised men. To suggest equivalence risks erasing women’s structural vulnerability to violence, while absolving men of their location within systems of power. It also obscures the reality that many men, even when themselves harmed, continue to act as enablers of patriarchal violence by refusing to challenge peers, institutions or cultural norms.
The book’s treatment of feminism compounds these issues. Masito adopts a universalist approach to gender equality that is notably detached from feminist theory, particularly black and African feminist traditions rooted in the South African context. By framing gender justice as a human issue devoid of feminist analysis, the book reproduces a familiar move in masculinity discourse: positioning feminism as exclusionary or excessive, while offering an ostensibly neutral alternative that, in practice, recentres men. This universalism collapses race and gender into a single axis of oppression, suggesting that black men’s racial marginalisation renders gender critique secondary or even inappropriate. Such a move misunderstands intersectionality, which insists not on competition between oppressions but on their co-constitution.
Another significant limitation of the text is its treatment of fatherlessness. Masito repeatedly positions father absence as a central explanatory factor for boys’ vulnerability, citing statistics on male absence from households and linking this absence to school dropout, substance use, violence and incarceration. While these correlations are not unfounded, the analysis remains incomplete. Fatherlessness is treated as a cause rather than as a symptom of broader structural conditions. The book asks where fathers are, but not sufficiently why they are absent. Apartheid labour systems, migrant work, incarceration, premature death, unemployment and economic exclusion are acknowledged only tangentially, if at all.
In failing to fully interrogate these structural forces, the book risks individualising what are fundamentally political and economic phenomena. This individualisation becomes evident when the problem of men in South Africa is attributed to “bad ideas”, poor role models, or moral failure. Such explanations obscure the historical production of these conditions and place responsibility at the level of personal ethics rather than structural constraint. They also sit uneasily alongside the book’s stated concern for boys’ vulnerability, as they implicitly demand moral accountability from men without adequately accounting for the systems that shape masculine possibility in the first place.
Perhaps most troubling is the book’s tendency to frame critique of men as inherently unconstructive. The suggestion that acknowledging men’s “shadows” should replace “bashing” black men misunderstands the political function of critique. Feminist and gender scholarship has long argued that critique is not an act of hatred but a necessary practice of accountability. Without it, calls for healing risk becoming sentimental appeals that prioritise comfort over transformation.
Despite these shortcomings, This Country Hates Our Boys should not be dismissed. Its insistence that boys matter, that their pain is real, and that neglect has consequences is both necessary and urgent. Where the book struggles is in holding vulnerability and power together. Boys can be harmed by the world and still grow into men who participate in harm. Any serious engagement with black boyhood must grapple with this tension rather than resolve it through moral simplification.
Masito’s book opens an important conversation, but it does not yet offer the analytical tools required to sustain it. To move forward, South Africa’s engagement with boys must be structurally grounded, pro-feminist in orientation and historically attentive. Healing, if it is to be meaningful, cannot be detached from politics. And care for boys, if it is to be transformative, must confront the realities of patriarchy, power and accountability. In this sense, This Country Hates Our Boys is best read not as a conclusion, but as an invitation: an invitation to deepen the conversation it begins and to insist that loving boys does not require abandoning feminist critique but rather demands it.
- Gobodo is a PhD graduate in sociology at the University of Stellenbosch whose research focuses on the relationship between masculinity and violence. He seeks to contribute insights to the broad discourse on gender, violence and societal structures.
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