Minutes of the Board

In Chikumanino of Kasama, in a year the historians have wisely declined to name, all matters of the heart were governed by a body known officially as The Board. And unofficially as The Board. This is because no one had ever been brave enough to call it anything else to its face. Or behind its back.

It was not registered with PACRA. This was deliberate. Registration would have made it accountable, and accountability was for institutions that intended to be fair.

A young man named Mwaba learned this in the commonest way most men learn everything: too late, embarrassingly and in public.

Mwaba was 27, employed as a shop attendant and in possession of two working shoes and a bicycle whose only reliable braking system required him to drag one foot along the ground and hope for cooperation from both the road and providence. The most conspicuous problem, however, was its severely worn-out tyres. Mwaba rented a small room and sent part of his salary home each month to support his sibling’s education. Having such qualities in that economy made him what the aunties called “Marriage Material.” 

He had fallen, catastrophically and against all professional advice, for a woman named Beatrice.

Beatrice worked at a mobile money booth. She remembered which customers sent money, received money or did both. She appeared to wear her heart on her sleeve, although the most important parts of it remained carefully folded away. She also possessed the rare gift of rejecting a man so decisively that he briefly reconsidered the institution of romance itself.

Mwaba had always noticed her because her booth was right in front of his shop. Beatrice first noticed him when he returned the extra 50 kwacha she had mistakenly given him after processing his withdrawal.

Neither admitted these things.

Instead, Mwaba began unnecessarily withdrawing and depositing money. His mother, receiving unusually frequent transfers, briefly believed her son had received a promotion.

Eventually, after three months of unnecessary mobile money transactions and increasingly weak excuses, Mwaba told Beatrice that he loved her.

He had rehearsed the speech for a week. In rehearsal, it was dignified and persuasive. In reality, his voice broke and he forgot most of what he had meant to say, and all of how he had meant to say it.

Beatrice looked at him for a long moment. She liked him. This complicated matters.

Mwaba may have spoken directly to Beatrice, but in reality, one did not propose to Beatrice alone. In that place and time, every proposal first had to survive the scrutiny of the woman’s circle of friends. Mwaba had submitted an application to Beatrice, and she forwarded it, as was procedure, to The Board

The Board convened, as it always did, on a Saturday, in a hair salon that smelled of burnt hair, hair oil and a lot of judgment.

The Board comprised four women.

There was Bwalya, the de facto Chairwoman, who had personally terminated eleven relationships and regretted none of them. At least that is what she told everyone.

There was Mwansa, Head of Due Diligence. Mwansa could trace a man’s entire romantic history using nothing but a stare, an unnamed source and the phrase, “I am not saying anything, but…”

There was Esther, Head of Compliance. Esther’s responsibility was to ensure that every approved suitor met the minimum standards. These standards had never been written down, because writing them down would have exposed their contradictions.

And there was Ntombi, the Secretary. Ntombi was small in stature, so her friends called her Auntie Small Small. Her enemies called her Little Ntombi. Ntombi took the minutes and, more importantly, took every disagreement as an attempt to dominate her on account of her height.

Beatrice sat outside while they deliberated. From behind the thin wall, she could hear her future being discussed between the hum of hair clippers and the occasional shout of another customer objecting to the price of braids.

The dossier on Mwaba was read aloud.

“Employment: confirmed,” said Mwansa. “Bicycle: confirmed. Tyres: partial.”

“Note the tyres,” said Compliance.

“Noted,” said the Secretary, noting the tyres.

“Character,” continued Due Diligence, consulting her findings. “He was once observed purchasing a plastic bag full of mangoes and eating them greedily as he walked along the street, without offering a single one to anyone.”

A silence fell over the room of the kind usually reserved for news of a death.

“How old was he,” asked the Chairwoman, “at the time of the Mango-gate scandal?”

“He must have been 17. We were both in Grade 12," Mwansa responded.

“The heart does not age,” said Compliance darkly, “and neither do bad manners.”

At the far end, Beatrice lowered her head to hide a smile. She wondered how an ordinary act of adolescent selfishness, committed years earlier, could be admitted as evidence against the man he had become. She considered mentioning this, but The Board regarded recent evidence of kindness as a common tactic among applicants.

The investigation continued.

“He does not own a house.”

“He is only twenty-seven,” Beatrice called through the wall.

“The applicant will not address The Board through management,” replied the Chairwoman.

“He wears the same blue shirt every Sunday,” said Mwansa.

“Blue is his favourite colour and he has many shirts,” said Beatrice.

“Or his only one,” said Compliance.

Little Ntombi recorded both possibilities.

The rejection arrived by WhatsApp the following afternoon, while Mwaba was attending the church youth meeting held every Sunday. It had been carefully composed by the Secretary, and Mwaba preserved a screenshot of it for the rest of his life, just in case Ntombi had activated disappearing messages on WhatsApp.

Dear Applicant,

Following review of your submission, The Board regrets to inform you that your proposal has not been successful at this time.

Reasons cannot be disclosed, as reasons are the property of The Board.

You are welcome to reapply after a period of self-improvement, the length and nature of which will not be specified.

We wish you the very best in your future endeavours, elsewhere.

Yours in governance,

The Board

He read it five times.

The first time, he thought it was a joke. The second time, he searched for a sentence that might contain hope. The third time, he became angry. By the fourth, the anger had gone, leaving behind the quieter pain of feeling that strangers had measured his life and found it insufficient.

The fifth time, he copied the message into an AI chatbot and asked what it meant, hoping the machine might discover some possibility his readings had missed.

He went, as generations of rejected men before him had gone, to the quiet place behind the church. By then, it had a bench, installed by a council that understood demand.

He sat among the other wounded and shed the customary two tears, blaming the dust, as was tradition.

But what hurt him most was not the rejection. It was the possibility that The Board might be right. Perhaps love belonged to men with houses, matching furniture and bicycles capable of stopping on command. Perhaps a person had to finish becoming worthy before asking anyone to share the unfinished life.

And here the story would have ended: filed, stamped and forgotten, another proposal declined by a properly functioning committee.

Except that The Board had made one error.

It had forgotten the single flaw in all systems of governance, the loophole no bylaw can close:

Management can overrule the Board.

While the committee deliberated over mangoes, shirts and tyres, Beatrice was the actual and only decision-maker, the woman whose life this all concerned. She had been conducting an assessment of her own.

She knew Mwaba was not ready. Neither was she.

She knew he might disappoint her. She also knew that caution could disappoint her just as thoroughly, only more slowly.

She understood something The Board did not: the remedy is in the poison. The very uncertainty that made love dangerous was what made it capable of changing a life. Remove the risk completely and one did not obtain perfect love. One obtained a transaction, properly documented and emotionally vacant.

During that week, Beatrice noticed Mwaba’s absence from her booth and began to question whether she had outsourced her own choice. The Board’s standards might protect her from embarrassment, she realised, but they could not protect her from loneliness.

By Wednesday, Beatrice found herself looking up whenever a bicycle passed.

By Saturday evening, Beatrice had reached her own decision. The following Sunday, she summoned Mwaba.

She found him behind the church, sitting upright and insisting to anyone who would hear that the dust had become unusually aggressive with his eyes.

She sat beside him.

“The Board rejected you,” she said.

“I received the minutes.”

“They were not minutes.”

“They felt very long.”

For a while, they watched a chicken cross the churchyard with the confidence of a creature answerable to no committee.

Then Beatrice informed him, kindly, that The Board’s decision had been reviewed at the executive level and reversed with immediate effect. She added that he should stop the week-long pity party because people had begun to notice his sadness.

Mwaba looked at her.

“Why?” he asked.

Beatrice could have mentioned his honesty, his gentleness or the way he listened without waiting for his turn to speak. She could have produced evidence and indicators. But none of those things fully explained it.

“For no sensible reason,” she said. “I simply choose you.”

Mwaba laughed then, not because it was funny, but because relief sometimes escapes the body wearing the wrong clothes.

The Board was furious.

The Board convened an emergency session. It issued a statement warning of procedural collapse, institutional overreach and the dangerous precedent of allowing the woman whose life was under discussion to make the final decision herself.

The statement was ignored, which is the fate of all statements.

Mwaba and Beatrice married.

Their life together was not the glowing road people imagine when they look back at a choice from a distance. It was a real road in Chikumanino: uneven, crowded and occasionally flooded with sewage, even during the dry season. There were arguments about money, forgotten errands and relatives who arrived without warning and stayed as if protected by international law.

Mwaba sometimes wondered whether he had married too early. Beatrice sometimes imagined a quieter life with a man who owned a car and never required anyone to push-start it. These were thoughts they kept to themselves for fear that society would treat them as pariahs for admitting that love had not eliminated every doubt.

Even so, they built a home in which laughter survived bad months. They raised children. They buried people they loved. They forgave each other for ordinary failures and a few extraordinary ones. The bicycle was eventually replaced, although Mwaba kept it for sentimental value.

Three years later, Esther—who had once treated another woman’s heart as a compliance matter—discovered that her own was no easier to govern. She was assembling a Board to review a man who had applied to occupy the vacancy in her heart.

When Beatrice told Mwaba about it, he approved immediately.

Then he heard that the young man owned very little that The Board would consider worth recording.

He demanded a full investigation.

Beatrice, listening from the kitchen, laughed so loudly that he remembered himself.

That evening, Beatrice called Esther to impart the only wisdom she had ever earned.

The Board would advise caution, she said. Boards always did. No one ever blamed caution for a broken heart, Beatrice said, although it could quietly cause one.

"Patience is valuable," she said. "But sometimes fear disguises itself as patience."

"That is comforting," Esther said.

"I am not finished. Whatever you choose, you will regret it. Not because you chose wrongly, but because the road you did not take stays paved and lit forever. No potholes, no unpaid bills, no difficult mornings. And walking along it, a better version of you—younger, certain, never once tested by anything real."

Esther was quiet for a moment. "So there is no right choice."

"There is only which regret you can live with."

"That is not very comforting either."

"No," Beatrice admitted. "But it is honest."

"You being right means I owe you an apology," Esther said, and began to laugh.

"Go ahead. I am listening."

"I said I owe you an apology," Esther replied. "That means you will receive it at some future, unscheduled date. Perhaps as a present on your next birthday."

They both burst out laughing, said their goodbyes and ended the call.

Esther considered Beatrice’s words.

The following morning, she informed The Board that its services were no longer required. For the first time, Compliance had failed to comply with itself.

She did not marry the man immediately. Choosing one’s regret, she had learned, did not require abandoning common sense. It required accepting that common sense could advise her but could not live her life on her behalf.

In time, Esther married the man The Board would never have approved, and they were reasonably happy. Not perfectly. Because perfect happiness is usually the invention of people observing from outside, but in the specific and hard-won way of those who take responsibility for the lives they choose.

There were days when Esther wondered whether The Board had seen something she had refused to see. There were also days when she imagined that some untrodden path might have led her to a larger house, an easier marriage or a version of herself who never doubted anything.

Then she remembered that the unlived road appeared smooth only because no one had ever forced it to carry the weight of an actual life. Ing'anda ushikalamo baikumbwa umutenge, as the old adage goes.

She returned to the difficult, ordinary life before her and refused, ever after, to blame it on the dust in Chikumanino.

Men's Language of Grief

Mwamuna sama lila (a man doesn’t cry). We all have heard this in life. Right??

There is a particular kind of loneliness that many men carry, one that hides in plain sight. It shows up at the office, at the dinner table, in the group chat full of jokes. It is the loneliness of a man who has learned, from boyhood, that his pain is his own private business — something to be managed quietly, out of view, like a debt he is ashamed of. A lot of men simply do not know how to ask for help. Not because they are incapable of feeling, but because somewhere along the way, they were taught that feeling out loud is a luxury they cannot afford. So they learn instead to act okay, even while drowning inside.

Two Languages of Grief

Women and men often grieve in different dialects. When a woman is hurting, she is more likely to say so — to a friend, a sister, a counsellor. Her tears are permitted, even expected, and this permission is a lifeline. It connects her pain to other people who can help carry it.

Men, by contrast, tend to cry in silence. In the car after a hard phone call. In the shower, where water disguises tears. At a desk late at night, staring at a screen long after the work is done. Anywhere no one will notice. Sometimes no tears fall at all — just a heavy, private silence, the kind that drowns a man slowly while he continues to show up, provide, and perform. The strongest man you know may be breaking right now, and you would never guess it, because he has become fluent in the language of “I’m good.”

The Weight of Expectation

Why do men hide? Much of it comes down to what society asks of them. A man is expected to provide and to lead. He is the one others look to when things fall apart. And who wants to see their leader crying? A father who breaks down worries he will frighten his children. A husband who admits he is struggling fears his wife will see him as less of a man. An employee who confesses burnout fears being passed over. So he smiles. He cracks jokes all day, pays the bills, keeps the machine running — and then spends the night staring at the ceiling while everyone else sleeps.

There is also the burden of time itself. While others are thinking about today or tomorrow, many men are quietly calculating next month and next year: school fees, rent, the aging parents, the what-ifs. This constant forward-planning is an act of love — a way of protecting the people who depend on him — but it is also a weight that never comes off. Some men carry it for so long that surviving becomes their default routine. They forget what peace even feels like. They no longer recognize their own exhaustion as pain, because it has simply become the temperature of their lives.

When Pain Finds Other Exits

Here is the tragedy: pain that is denied a voice does not disappear. It finds other exits. Some men channel it into anger, snapping at the people they love most. Some bury themselves in work, mistaking exhaustion for purpose. Some reach for the bottle, medicating a wound they cannot name. And some simply disappear emotionally — present in body, absent in spirit, a ghost at their own dinner table.

This is where the statistics stop being abstract and become devastating. Across nearly every country in the world, men die by suicide at significantly higher rates than women — in many nations, three to four times higher — even though women report depression and attempt suicide more often. Researchers call this the “gender paradox of suicide,” and its explanations map almost perfectly onto everything described above. Men are far less likely to seek professional help or confide in anyone before a crisis, so their distress goes undetected until it is too late. Men tend to use more lethal means, turning a moment of despair into a permanent decision. And men are more likely to mask depression with alcohol, which deepens hopelessness and weakens restraint. A woman in crisis often leaves a trail of signals — conversations, tears, calls for help. A man in crisis often leaves nothing but a shocked community saying, “But he seemed fine.”

The same suppressed pain that turns inward as suicide can also turn outward as violence. Globally, roughly nine out of ten homicides are committed by men, and most of the victims are men too. This is not because men are born more cruel; it is partly because anger is the one emotion many men were ever allowed to express. A boy who is mocked for crying but tolerated for fighting learns a dangerous lesson: sadness is weakness, but rage is strength. Fast-forward twenty years, and the man who never learned to say “I am hurting” instead says it with his fists, or worse. Add to this the way masculine culture ties respect to dominance — where an insult in a bar or a dispute over money becomes a test of manhood that cannot be walked away from — and the pattern becomes tragically legible. Suicide and violence are, in many ways, two faces of the same coin: unspoken pain seeking an exit.

What Men Actually Need

It would be easy to conclude that men need to “open up,” and leave it there. But most men are not asking for sympathy. In fact, sympathy can feel disempowering — like being pitied, like confirmation that he has failed at the one job he was given. What many men want is something quieter and more dignified: peace. Understanding. One moment where they do not have to act strong. A friend who asks “how are you, really?” and waits for the true answer. A culture that lets a leader be human without stripping him of his authority.

Change begins in small places. It begins with fathers telling their sons that tears are not treason. It begins with friends who check on the man who “seems fine,” because seeming fine is precisely how men hide. It begins with workplaces, churches, and communities treating a man’s mental health with the same seriousness as his salary. And it begins with men themselves recognizing that carrying weight silently is not strength — it is slow erosion — and that asking for help is not surrender but strategy. No general fights a war alone.

Conclusion

Men cry differently. They cry in silence, in work, in anger, in absence. They cry in ceilings stared at through sleepless nights and in jokes told a little too loudly. The numbers — the suicides, the violence — are simply that hidden crying made visible, too late. If we want fewer men dying quietly and fewer men exploding loudly, we must build a world where a man’s pain is allowed to speak before it is forced to scream. Because behind every man who “seems fine” may be someone fighting the hardest battle of his life — and all he needs is one safe moment to put the weight down.

The cliff has not moved

Something extraordinary and deeply unsettling happened in 2005 in the Turkish village of Gevas. One sheep walked off a cliff, and then 1,499 others followed. The shepherds had stepped away for breakfast. In their brief absence, a single animal moved toward danger, and the rest instinctively followed. By the time the movement became visible, it was already too late. More than 450 sheep died, while those behind survived only because the growing pile of bodies broke their fall.

At first glance, it sounds like the kind of story so absurd that it belongs in folklore. Yet biologists and animal behaviourists were not surprised. Sheep are wired to follow the movement of those nearest to them rather than independently assess the terrain ahead. In most circumstances, this instinct is highly effective. It keeps the flock together and protects individuals from external threats. The tragedy is that the very behaviour that had ensured survival for generations became fatal in the wrong environment.

It is tempting to laugh at the sheep.

But many organisations operate in exactly the same way.

The Gevas incident is not merely a story about animal behaviour. It is a powerful lesson about leadership, management, organisational culture, and the risks of collective decision-making when critical thinking disappears.

Most organisational decisions are not made in isolation. Employees watch managers. Managers watch executives. Executives watch competitors, consultants, donors, industry trends, and peer organisations. Learning from others is often sensible and efficient. The danger emerges when organisations stop asking whether the direction is right and focus only on whether everyone else is moving in the same direction.

How many organisations adopt new management frameworks because they are fashionable rather than effective? How many strategic plans are copied from competitors? How many initiatives are launched because they are popular in boardrooms rather than because they solve a genuine organisational problem?

When conformity replaces critical thinking, organisations begin to mistake consensus for wisdom. The sheep did not evaluate the cliff. They evaluated the movement of the flock. Many organisations do the same.

The most important detail in the Gevas story is not that the sheep followed one another. It is that the shepherds were absent.

Leadership is often misunderstood as authority. In reality, leadership is the continuous process of observing, guiding, correcting, and anticipating risk. When leadership becomes distracted, disengaged, or complacent, organisations create a vacuum.

Vacuums rarely remain empty for long. In the absence of active leadership, the loudest voice often becomes the dominant voice. The most confident opinion becomes the accepted opinion. Assumptions go unchallenged. Weak decisions gain momentum simply because nobody intervenes early enough.

Many organisational failures do not begin with bad intentions. As the saying goes, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." More often, however, they begin with absent attention. The challenge for leaders is not simply to set direction. It is to remain sufficiently engaged to recognise when the organisation is drifting toward danger.

 

One consequence of disengaged leadership is the emergence of groupthink, one of the greatest threats to organisational performance. In many organisations, people quickly learn that challenging prevailing opinions carries risk. They remain silent in meetings. They suppress concerns. They nod in agreement despite privately recognising flaws in a proposal. Over time, this creates an illusion of consensus.

Healthy organisations understand that disagreement is not a threat to unity; it is often a prerequisite for sound decision-making.

As one of my former lecturers used to say, if two people agree on everything, only one of them is doing the thinking.

Strong leaders deliberately create environments where dissent is welcomed, assumptions are tested, and uncomfortable questions are encouraged. They understand that constructive disagreement improves decisions long before problems become crises.

The first sheep paid the highest price. In organisations, the equivalent individuals are often whistle-blowers, innovators, risk officers, auditors, and employees who raise concerns before others recognise a problem.

These people rarely receive immediate praise. Instead, they are frequently viewed as difficult, disruptive, or pessimistic. Yet organisational history repeatedly demonstrates that many major failures were preceded by warnings that leaders chose to ignore.

The organisations that thrive are not those that eliminate criticism. They are those that listen to it. An employee who identifies a risk early is not undermining the organisation. They are helping to protect it. Effective leaders recognise this distinction.

The sheep's instinct to stay together was not a flaw. It was a strength operating in the wrong environment. The same principle applies to organisations. Processes, cultures, and management practices that deliver success under one set of conditions may become liabilities when circumstances change. A culture built on loyalty can become resistant to accountability. A culture built on stability can become hostile to innovation. A culture built on efficiency can become incapable of adaptation.

The challenge of leadership is not simply preserving organisational strengths. It is recognising when those strengths are becoming obstacles to future success. Effective leaders continually ask a difficult question: what worked yesterday, but may not work tomorrow?

Organisations often become vulnerable when they rely too heavily on systems, routines, and established ways of thinking. Systems are valuable because they create consistency and efficiency. Yet no system can anticipate every change in its environment. There are moments when circumstances shift faster than procedures can adapt. In those moments, success depends on individuals who are willing to question assumptions, recognise emerging risks, and act before the rest of the organisation catches up. The ability to think independently is not a threat to organisational cohesion. It is one of the conditions that makes long-term resilience possible.

Once the sheep began falling, intervention was almost impossible. The opportunity to prevent disaster existed before the first movement occurred. This is perhaps the most important leadership lesson of all. Management is often associated with solving problems. Leadership is about preventing problems from becoming crises.

The best leaders spend less time reacting and more time anticipating. They monitor emerging risks, encourage difficult conversations, challenge assumptions, and build systems that detect weak signals before those signals become emergencies.

Most organisational disasters do not occur without warning. The warnings are usually present. They are simply ignored until the consequences become impossible to overlook.

The sheep of Gevas were not stupid. They were operating within a system that rewarded following, lacked active oversight, and failed to recognise danger early enough.

Many organisations face the same risk. Talented employees can still make poor collective decisions. Capable teams can still drift into failure. Strong institutions can still walk over cliffs if leadership is absent, dissent is discouraged, and risks are ignored.

The lesson is not that organisations should avoid collaboration or consensus. The lesson is that leaders must actively read the terrain ahead. Because by the time everyone agrees on the direction, it may already be too late.

The cliff rarely appears without warning.

The real question is whether anyone is watching for it.