THE DRIFT

 

Something is happening to men. And nobody wants to say it plainly. The marriageable man; the provider, the protector, the man of conviction and backbone, is becoming a rare species. Not because nature ran out of males, but because culture systematically dismantled what made a man marriage-worthy in the first place. And now, the very women who cheered that dismantling are staring at a shrinking pool of men who meet their "standards” and wondering where all the good men went. They went nowhere. You watched them get destroyed. Some of them joined the destruction. The drift is huge.

 

Walk into any gathering of educated, "empowered" women in their late twenties and thirties. Listen carefully. Beneath the confidence and the career achievements and the Instagram captions about "unbothered energy," there is a quiet, persistent anxiety; there are no men.

Not literally. Men exist. But marriageable men, by the very standards these women have constructed, are vanishing. He must earn more than her. He must be tall, emotionally available but not soft, ambitious but present, traditional but progressive, a provider but not controlling. The checklist is long. The men who tick every box are few. And those few? They have options. Many options.

 

This is not a coincidence. This is arithmetic. When you raise the bar on one side of the equation without raising the corresponding value on the other side, the numbers stop working. And so, polygamy, once dismissed as primitive, as backward, as African in the most condescending use of that word; begins to look less like a cultural relic and more like an inevitability.

 

Let me be precise here. The quest for dignity, respect and opportunity for women is not the enemy. A well-cultured, respectful, submissive woman who carries herself with grace is not a weak woman, she is a formidable one. Our grandmothers built entire nations quietly. Nobody called them oppressed.

 

What broke something in our society is a specific strain of empowerment; the imported, social-media-amplified, deeply Western version that told African women that service is oppression. That cooking for your husband is beneath you. That softness is weakness. That submission is slavery. And most delusional, that men and women are equal.

 

African men, many of them, did one of two things. Some retreated. They watched, calculated the cost of marriage, and said, ‘Not worth it.” These are your "men who fear marriage." They are not cowards. They are risk-assessors. When a contract offers you responsibility without respect, why sign it?

 

Others collapsed. They became what the internet calls simps, bending, apologizing, shrinking themselves to earn approval from women who were taught that a man's sacrifice is owed, not appreciated. You've seen them. Dancing on trending challenges. Competing for female validation online. Loud about nothing. Convinced about nothing.

 

The social media assembly line of broken standards is hectic, in every scroll is a lesson. And the lesson being taught, relentlessly, is this: as an empowered woman, you owe a man nothing, but he owes you everything.

 

She cannot cook, that is a red flag for him. She cannot submit, that is trauma she is healing from. She has a body count that would concern a reasonable man, he must "secure" her anyway or he is insecure. She brings a list of demands that would humble a king, but she brings no corresponding offering. And the men who push back? Misogynists. Threatened. Broke. Toxic. Can't handle a strong woman.

 

Meanwhile the African woman who knows how to build a home, who understands that a man's ego is not his weakness but his engine, who moves with grace and purpose, she is being told by influencers with ring lights and rented apartments that she is oppressed. Our culture is being laughed out of our own homes. And we are clapping along.

 

In Maasai society, the roles are not cages, they are architecture. The structure of a home, a family, and a community is deliberate. Men are warriors, providers, decision-makers. Women were the axis around which the home rotates; respected, central, powerful in their sphere. Not because one was greater than the other, but because a house needs walls and a roof. Both. Simultaneously. Outsiders looked at this and called it oppression. They wrote papers. They made documentaries. They sent NGOs. All to fix what was not broken, and in the process, introduced fractures that are still spreading. The African man who has forgotten how to lead and the African woman who has forgotten how to build; they are both victims of the same foreign syllabus taught as liberation.

 

Here is the cold logic, the inevitable finale, that polite society refuses to discuss. If marriageable men are scarce, and marriage-ready women are many, then mathematics will eventually impose its own solution. Polygamy; structured, honest, culturally grounded, distributes the available supply of capable men across more households. It is not ideal. It is not romantic. But it is functional in a way that a generation of single, childless, unfulfilled women at forty is not. The West already has its own version, they call it situationships, rotation, "we're just talking." It is polygamy without honesty. Without the structure. Without the protection for the woman.

 

At least the Maasai elder who takes a second wife does so openly, with cultural accountability, with defined roles and protections. Compare that to the modern arrangement where a woman is exclusively committed to a man who is not exclusively committed to her, but she cannot say so because they "never had the label conversation." Which is truly more dignified?

 

Are we losing our African touch? I think we lost portions of it quietly, scroll by scroll, trend by trend, NGO report by NGO report. And of course, mainstream media narratives. The man who provides without apology. The woman who builds without resentment. The home that has order; not because someone is a slave, but because someone chose a role and honored it. That was not backwardness. That was civilization. Our civilization.

 

And now we mock it. We trade it for validation from strangers on the internet. We let foreign frameworks define what our liberation should look like. I am not saying go back to everything. I am saying, know what you are throwing away before you throw it. Because the alternative being built in its place? It is not freedom. It is loneliness. Dressed up in empowerment language. Posted in good lighting.