Whenever I attend Parents' Day, there is one moment that never leaves me. As I sit waiting for the programme to begin, my eyes instinctively wander across the audience.
I have attended Parents' Days for many years, both as a parent and as a Board of Management (BOM) member. One pattern has become impossible to ignore. The hall is almost always filled with mothers. Fathers are remarkably few. Sometimes I count them on my fingers.
I used to dismiss this as coincidence. I persuaded myself that the fathers were probably away on duty or engaged in equally important responsibilities. I was wrong. The pattern has persisted. Every empty chair where a father should have sat asks me the same question: Where did the fathers go?
This same question follows me beyond the school compound. Increasingly, I meet young women in their late twenties and thirties raising children on their own. Whenever our conversations turn to the fathers of those children, I receive almost the same answer, usually accompanied by a resigned smile: "Aliingia msituni." He disappeared.
I have heard that expression so often that it has become part of our social vocabulary. Of course, every family has its own story. Some fathers have died. Others remain committed to their children despite separation from their spouses.
However, it would be dishonest to pretend that we are not witnessing a growing phenomenon of fathers who are physically or emotionally absent from the lives of their children. The empty chairs in school halls and the stories narrated by many single mothers belong to the same social narrative.
A few weeks ago, during a public gathering, the Governor of Vihiga County, Wilber Ottichilo, challenged me to speak about the plight of the boy child. His concern arose from the growing number of boys dropping out of school. My thoughts immediately returned to those empty chairs and to the many mothers quietly carrying responsibilities they had hoped to share.
The Igbo have a proverb, popularised by Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart, that whenever you see a toad jumping in broad daylight, something must be pursuing it. Toads do not willingly abandon the safety of the shade. Something forces them into the open. Our boys are that toad, and they are saying something to us. Let me explain.
It has often been said that literature is society's mirror. I sometimes think literature is more than a mirror. It is society's prophet. Long before we began talking about the crisis of the boy child, our first-generation novelists had already sensed that something fundamental was changing in the lives of African men. They saw the cracks before the rest of us noticed the walls trembling.
Once again, let’s consider Things Fall Apart. We often remember Okonkwo as the embodiment of masculine strength, courage and authority. He is hardworking, fearless and determined never to resemble his father, whom he considers weak. But beneath that image lies a profound tragedy. Okonkwo is imprisoned by a rigid understanding of masculinity. When his society begins to change under the combined forces of colonialism and Christianity, he cannot imagine another way of being a man. The institutions that gave meaning to his identity collapse before his eyes. In the end, it is not colonialism that defeats Okonkwo. Rather, it is his inability to reinvent himself when history demands a different understanding of manhood.
I think many men today are confronting a version of Okonkwo's tragedy. The economic foundations upon which they built their identities have been disrupted. Stable employment has declined. The digital economy rewards knowledge, adaptability and emotional intelligence rather than physical strength alone. The economy has changed rapidly, but our understanding of masculinity has remained stubbornly rooted in yesterday's world.
This changing world was also captured with remarkable sensitivity in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Armah's unnamed protagonist is simply an honest man trying to preserve his dignity in a society that rewards corruption rather than integrity. His crisis is existential. He can no longer locate himself in a society whose moral compass has shifted.
Like Armah's protagonist, many men continue searching for meaning in a world that no longer resembles the one their fathers prepared them to inhabit. Last year, I, too, made my contribution to this debate in my novel Beyond the Dark Clouds (2025). I had to rescue my protagonist, Feni, from destruction by inventing a social father for him.
The concerns we are raising as novelists have found remarkable echoes in contemporary scholarship. Literature sensed the tremors long before social scientists began measuring them.
In The End of Men, Hanna Rosin argues that technological and economic changes have fundamentally altered traditional gender roles, creating opportunities that increasingly reward qualities long undervalued in both men and women.
The industrial economy that privileged physical strength has steadily given way to a knowledge economy where adaptability, emotional intelligence and collaboration often matter more than muscle. In this new world, many men find themselves searching for a new definition of their place in society.
Rosin points us towards a reality that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. The old script of masculinity is under immense pressure. The tragedy is that while the world has changed dramatically, many of our boys continue to be prepared for a world that no longer exists. We are preparing them to live by rules whose foundations have already shifted beneath their feet.
That is why I have to say something that is often misunderstood. These are difficult times for many men. Not because women are succeeding. Rather, because society has changed much faster than many men have been prepared to change with it. And this is where our conversations about the boy child often become superficial.
Instead of merely lamenting declining examination performance, alcoholism, crime and drug abuse, we have to ask deeper questions: What kind of men are we preparing our boys to become? If the old definition of masculinity has collapsed, what has replaced it? The answers cannot be nostalgia. The past will not return.
Our boys need a new language of manhood. They must learn that strength is no longer measured merely by physical power or financial success. Character, emotional maturity, responsibility, compassion and integrity have become equally important. Above all, they need fathers who are present, not merely as providers, but as mentors.
Margaret Ogola's The River and the Source teaches us something profound. Women hold families together with extraordinary resilience while many men disappear, falter, or fail to provide moral leadership. The novel celebrates the resilience of women in the face of these challenges.
Our women have risen magnificently to the occasion, but the silence surrounding the struggles of many men is impossible to ignore. In many respects, the absent fathers at today's Parents' Day meetings are the living echoes of the questions Margaret Ogola posed. Whenever I leave those meetings, what remains in my mind are the empty chairs and the patient faces of mothers determined to carry on. Where are the men? "Waliingia msituni."
Prof Egara Kabaji is a writer, educationist, and researcher based at Masinde Muliro University. He is also the Vice President of the Pan African Writers Association (PAWA) and the Chancellor of Mt. Kigali University, Rwanda.
