Hybrid symposium

Over the past decades, critical studies of men and masculinities globally have continued to, whether consciously or not, frame Black masculinities as the “antithesis of white masculinities”. The study of Black men’s masculinities within this subfield has not only been juxtaposed with that of white men, but it has also solidified the immovable demise of pathology as innate to the existence and performances of Black masculinities. As a pathway to present counter-narratives to the hegemonic damage-centred paradigm, Black researchers in Africa have called for the decolonisation of Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities in Africa.

Embedded within this decolonial call, the symposium will seek to tether on the historical consciousness that Black masculine subjectivities are contingent on the colonial imposition and mechanisation of discursive power that distorted and fundamentally re-made colonised men’s selfhoods, through the violent inscriptions of a new ontology of gender, that unmade racialised men and masculinities into the “lost, dying/ dead and always in-crisis manhood“. Here, however, we, through this symposium, seek not simply to write, read and engage these men and masculinities as though “victims” of history.

Therefore, to “rupture”, we evoke Miller’s (2018) conceptualisation to understand that post-colonial expressions, constructions, embodiments, practices and performances of Black men and masculinities present material and ideological conditions of change, yet structural conditions persist. In this symposium premise, it is essential to unpack how subjectivities constructed over time and space facilitate the emergence of new imaginations, practices and understandings of the Black men and masculinities world (and world-making).

Therefore, as we intend in this symposium, an engagement with these ruptures does not guarantee a replacement but rather offers a perspective into centring the conditions of possibility whereby Black men and masculinities in Africa explore new social relations and ideas with self, other men, women, children, and structures.

Keynote Speaker

Ndumiso Daluxolo Ngidi

In this keynote address, I draw on my scholarship examining Black masculinities, boyhoods, violence, and spatial inequality in post-apartheid South Africa. Moving beyond deficit-based representations that routinely position Black boys and men as inherently violent, dysfunctional, or “in crisis,” I argue that masculinities must be understood within the intersecting histories of colonialism, apartheid, racial capitalism, spatial exclusion, patriarchy, and socio-cultural geographies. Drawing on ethnographic, participatory visual, and qualitative research conducted in township, peri-urban, and school contexts in KwaZulu-Natal, I explore how masculinities are socially produced through schools, peer cultures, neighbourhoods, heterosexual relationships, and everyday struggles for dignity, belonging, and recognition.

The keynote examines how violence and gender inequality become normalised within schoolboy masculinities through practices such as ukufikisana, while also demonstrating how young men navigate fractured urban geographies shaped by class inequality, territoriality, and symbolic exclusion. I further explore how heterosexual masculinity is negotiated through peer-regulated expectations surrounding provision, sexual legitimacy, and masculine status. At the same time, the keynote foregrounds the emotional, ethical, and relational dimensions of Black boyhood through the concept of reflective masculinities, which captures how boys actively contest dominant gender expectations through care, aspiration, spirituality, friendship, and self-reflection. Ultimately, I argue for more nuanced, African-centred, socio-cultural, and spatially grounded understandings of Black masculinities that recognise boys and young men not merely as subjects of violence, but as complex human beings navigating deeply unequal social worlds. In doing so, the keynote calls for gender-transformative, decolonial, and peacebuilding approaches that reimagine the possibilities of masculine becoming in the Global South.

Exhibition

Dr Elizabeth Hoorn Petersen

There is a growing tendency to create and cement the divides between African women and African men through an ever-intensifying focus on amplifying primarily the harmful practices of some African men towards women and propagating this as the main profile of African men. The Men Affirming Dignity (MAD) exhibition – brain child of the South African Faith and Family Institute (SAFFI), seeks to talk back (c/f bell hooks) at this persistent harmful narrative. The MAD exhibition includes Sign Language and recently digitised (Android app) writes into history, narratives about the humanity of 14 “coloured” African men on the Cape Flats who live their lives affirming dignity whilst navigating the lingering effects of apartheid, dislocation, segregation, systematic violent assaults against their personhood. The partnership with Iziko Museums of South Africa, enabled SAFFI to curate this catalytic exhibition which represents muted or ignored histories of countless African men who navigation dehumanizing hostile contexts and “emerge still human in spite of all efforts to dehumanize them” (Desmond Tutu). We understand that: the multiple oppressions instilled across generations during the apartheid era [which] cannot be easily wiped away from the life histories of men and women still living in a grossly unequal society and for whom the trauma of violence has been part of the furniture of family life for many generations.” (Boonzaaier & Gadd, 2015:1431).

Drawing Afrocentricity, SAFFI’s MAD exhibition is igniting community conversations, individual and collective memory of living and deceased African “MAD” men. We are reclaiming heritage, excavating, amplifying and preserving religious/cultural resources in our quest to heal relationships between women and men whilst building resilient communities where individuals, families and communities thrive and flourish.

Symposium Delegates RSVP click here.

Download Programme

2026 Symposium on Black Men Masculinities programme 2026 (PDF, 147 Kb)