Masculinity Workshop Facilitation

I run a series of talks, workshops, and seminars in schools across the world championing healthier ideas of masculinity.

Subjects covered include:

• Mental health & well-being
• Sex & consent
• Male violence
• Our fathers
• Masculinity & Culture
• Modern man and feminism
• Navigating emotions as a man
• Dealing with rejection
• The nice guy
• Trauma healing & speaking up
• Creating healthy male friendships/communities
• Building a legacy

Background

I’m the firstborn of three children. My father is the firstborn of eight. His mother was his father’s third and last wife. The first and last wives were sisters. I didn’t meet the first wife. She died a year before my birth.

Grandpa had about 30 children. Yes. that village was a small city. I have too many cousins some of whose names I am yet to master.

Grandpa was not the richest man. It got to a point he couldn’t educate all his children. Well, family planning issues. So the older siblings had to help out the younger ones with school fees when they got jobs. He and I did not have the deepest relationship. The most intimate memory I have of him was when he brewed me some coffee from berries he fetched in his shamba. It is to date one of the sweetest drinks of my life. I was about six.

He loved bicycles and sitting by himself in his house which was placed in the middle of the village. His wives’ houses were behind his. All three of them. He laughed occasionally and had a stern face for much of the time. He loved his alcohol a bit too much. And he was a strong man by the physique, however much his body seemed frail by the eye. He could walk and walk and walk.

There are many other attributes of him I do not know. The bits and pieces I get were that he ensured the whole family had enough food. Having come from a poor family himself, and not having done many schools if any at all, this was a humongous achievement by the standards of the time. Even the fact that he managed to take some of his children to school. I don’t know what the plan was to take care of all the 25+ kids, but it is what it is.

I heard stories about how people would scatter whenever he’d enter the village. He was fierce. He’d discipline his wives before his kids. He expected perfection from everyone. And his children were not spared.

It was a chaotic environment. I later learned that he had been a soldier for the British in World War II deployed to Burma. It took me 15 years to discern that grandpa had suffered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which explained much of his erratic violence. That, coupled, of course, with the enabling of the patriarchy.

He would pass down trauma to his children. My father caught wind of it and owned it. He became his father; and by design, I was next in line.

Having battled depression, anxiety, and PTSD for 15 years, half my life at the time, I could not live with the ghosts in my head anymore. I’ve felt suicidal twice, would run away from home for peace of mind, sleeping in Nairobi streets because I couldn’t stand the violence at home. But finally, at 29, it was time to understand the voices in my head.

Beginning therapy made me feel cheated; how come I went to school but nobody ever taught me the importance of taking care of my mind, of understanding who I am, of emotional regulation? What were they preparing me for then?

And why are men killing themselves more than anybody else?

Why are men violent against each other, women and children?

Why does it seem like they are strong in a mob but weak when they are alone? What’s that about?

These are the questions whose answers I seek with the groups I work within masculinity workshops. We get to interrogate ourselves. Get to reflect on our identity.