Online Reporter
Alice Tagwira-Beyond Boundaries
There is a proverb whispered in various tongues across the African continent: “A home is built on the shoulders of a woman,” or as they say in Shona, musha mukadzi.
For generations, this has been sung as a tribute to resilience. Today, however, it reads more like a psychological indictment.
Beneath the grand narrative of African resilience lies a quiet, fracturing bedrock. Mental health — a concept long dismissed as a foreign luxury or a spiritual failing — is extracting a devastating toll on Africa’s men, women, youth, and leaders.
We are a continent surviving, but we are not healing.
To understand the crisis, we must first strip it of its clinical coldness.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines mental health not merely as the absence of mental disorders, but as “a state of well-being in which an individual realises his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.”
Yet, across many African societies, this definition is lost in translation. Historically, mental health has been misunderstood, viewed through a binary lens: you are either “sane” or you are “mad.”
There is rarely a middle ground for the anxious, the depressed, or the trauma-bonded. According to WHO reports, Africa accounts for an estimated 25 percent of the global burden of mental, neurological, and substance use disorders, yet the continent allocates less than 1percent of its already strained health budgets to mental health.
The result is a profound literacy gap, where emotional suffering is miscategorised, ignored, or worse, criminalised.
Nowhere is this lack of understanding more tragic than in the fate of our elderly. In many rural communities, neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia are not recognised as neurological ailments. Instead, when an elderly grandmother becomes disoriented, wanders from home, or speaks incoherently, she is swiftly branded a witch.
“We have weaponised our ignorance against the very people who carried us.” — Dr Chioma Nwosu, neuropsychologist.
Tragically, this superstition carries a death sentence. Across countries like Ghana, Kenya, and Tanzania, elderly women are routinely ostracised, banished to “witch camps,” or subjected to mob justice. We have replaced the clinical neurologist with the village witch-hunter, punishing the vulnerable for the crime of growing old in a system that refuses to learn.
If the elderly are persecuted outwardly, African men are imploding inwardly.
The statistics are horrifying: the WHO African Region has the highest suicide rate in the world, standing at an estimated 11 per 100 000 people.
The vast majority of these deaths are men.
This is the lethal tax of toxic masculinity.
From boyhood, the African male is fed a steady diet of stoicism: “A man is a sheep, he bleeds from within.”
He is told that vulnerability is a defect, that tears are a feminine luxury, and that to be weak is to be disqualified from manhood.
Central to this construct is the crushing mandate that a man must be the sole provider. But what happens when the economy collapses? What happens when retrenchment hits, or when inflation makes a basic grocery basket an unattainable luxury?
If a man cannot afford to provide, does it make him less of a man?
Society’s silent answer is often “yes,” leaving men stranded in an emotional wasteland. Unable to vent, unable to provide, and unable to cry, many choose the ultimate, permanent exit. They hang themselves from trees, swallow pesticides, or drive into oncoming traffic — all in the name of preserving a stoic dignity that killed them long before their hearts stopped beating.
While men die out loud, African women are expected to suffer in absolute silence. The cultural romanticisation of musha mukadzi forces women to become emotional shock absorbers.
A woman is expected to shoulder the physical labour, the psychological trauma of fractured marriages, the emotional management of broken men, and the mental strain of poverty — all while keeping a pristine smile to maintain the family’s public image. She is told that a good wife “perseveres.”
This cultural gaslighting transforms resilience into a trap. Underneath the stoic façade, depression flourishes.
African women suffer from generalised anxiety disorders and clinical depression at rates significantly higher than men, yet they rarely seek help because doing so would be an admission that the “home” they are supposed to hold up is falling apart.
Meanwhile, Africa’s youth — often touted as the continent’s greatest demographic dividend — are drowning in synthetic escapes. Faced with skyrocketing unemployment rates (exceeding 30 percent to 40 percent in several sub-Saharan nations), a collapsing education-to-job pipeline, and political instability, many young Africans simply cannot see a future.
In response, they have turned to drug and substance abuse not as a recreational pastime, but as an impromptu anaesthesia.
From the BronCleer and mutoriro (crystal meth) ravaging Zimbabwe, to tramadol abuses in West Africa, to nyaope in South Africa, the diagnosis is the same— chemical escapism. When reality offers no hope, a chemical oblivion becomes the only affordable sanctuary.
We are losing an entire generation to addiction, not because they lack ambition, but because they lack a horizon.
Perhaps the most well-hidden victims of this crisis are those who hold the reins of society. Political, civic, corporate, and religious leaders are trapped in an echo chamber of performance. They are paid to be strong, omniscient, and infallible.
Consider the clergy. Pastors, priests, and imams are the unofficial psychologists of Africa. Every Sunday or Friday, thousands of broken congregants dump their trauma, marital failures, financial anxieties, and grief onto their altars.
But who is pastoring the pastor?
The Reverse Counselling Paradox:
Congregants’ baggage =======> the pastor’s shoulders
The pastor’s trauma =======> absolute silence
Religious leaders cannot confess depression without being accused of a lack of faith or demonic oppression. Corporate executives cannot admit to panic attacks without tanking shareholder confidence. Political leaders cannot speak of burnout without weaponising their weakness for their opponents. They suffer in absolute, luxurious isolation, suffocating under the weight of expectations they can never humanly meet.
Africa cannot develop on a fractured psyche. We can build roads, launch tech hubs, and sign trade pacts, but if the minds operating them are broken, our progress will remain a mirage.
We must decolonise our understanding of mental health.
It is not an ancestral curse, nor is it a Western malady. It is biology; it is human.
We must build community-based psychological infrastructure, integrate mental health into primary care, and dismantle the deadly hyper-masculine and hyper-resilient myths that kill our people.
It is time to tell the man that he can cry, the woman that she can rest, the youth that there is a future, and the elder that their fading memory is loved, not cursed. Only then can we truly build a home that stands.
