Mr Ernest Bazanye

A life in which you help people in need is a good one, yes. A life of a hero saving people in need is a good one, yes. But a life in which you need and have received help, a life in which you have been there, shit got real and someone saved you, that is a deeper, a more deeply rich life. It gives you things you don’t get from power and success and strength.

It gives you, for starters, what some people call humility, but what is is actually a judicious appreciation of what you are in this world. It gives you a solid understanding that what you are is different from what you want to be, what you imagine you are, what they say you are, and what they say you are supposed to be. You understand you are a flake of dust on the tip of an spiderweb. Some say humility is the assumption that you are not great. That is part of it, but to have a complete understanding, you don’t just need to know that you are not great. You also need the realization that no one is. We are all, all of us, everyone, every single one of us, weak.

Until you understand that, you are living as if you’re watching TV. There will always be a distance between you and everyone else you think you know or love. You will live as if you’re watching them on TV. You will see their performances, performances they make for you and performances they make for themselves. Until the day you fall and see for yourself the fear everyone else has been hiding from you, if not just from themselves, you will have friends, you will have loved ones, but you won’t love as fully as a person who has fallen.

And then, if when you fall, you are saved, if someone got you and saved you, and you saw what it means for another person to be there for you, then you will know that you have the power, the far greater and more precious power, to do the same for another person, and that is when you will know that what it means to be human is greater that what it means to be a man.

Of course, many of us, by the time we are of beer-bellowing, beef-lusania age, we have had that revelatory instance. We already know. And I like to think that I can discern the difference when I hear those belly laughs from the rowdy Rotaractors shouting at Rugby Club. They all sound like douchebags who drive drunk on Sunday evenings, but somewhere among the packs and gaggles of men laughing too loudly and calling each other, “Gwe you man!” there has to be a trio of lifelong ride-or-dies who have waded through pits together. And when they shout their beer, it is a celebration of a strong bond of brotherhood.

I wonder often, when I look at them, I wonder about this bond that is not just human friendship or love, it is something uniquely masculine. There’s a way men meet that takes a certain shape and weight that I have only ever seen emerge from male spaces. There is that thing men have that is unspoken but louder than the beer that makes people they know outside their bond jut their lower lip out and say, “Hmmm. You know very well that if you tell Ssuuna, you have basically told all of Jemo and Ox as well.” You know the bond. That thing that makes it clear to whoever is listening that whoever dares try to you fuck with him, fucks with all of us.

And even when I wish they would use indoor voices sometimes, I won’t deny being jealous of that.