The Strength To Say You're Not Fine

The Numbers Behind the Silence

South Africa is not a gentle place to be a man. The figures are stark: men account for approximately 79% of all mental-health-related deaths in the country. South African men are four to five times more likely to die by suicide than women. The country ranks tenth globally for suicide rates, recording an estimated 14,000 deaths from intentional self-harm each year. These numbers represent the shape of a crisis that largely goes unnamed because the people it is most affecting have been taught, usually from childhood, not to name it.

That problem is not unique to conservation work, but it is not absent from it either. The work our male staff do is physical, demanding, emotionally complex, and often invisible to outsiders. Caring for animals through injury, illness, and loss; managing the relentlessness of daily operations; showing up regardless of what is happening at home - these are not conditions that invite vulnerability. In environments where toughness is a professional virtue, the gap between what a man feels and what he says can be very wide indeed.

This is precisely why mornings like today matter.

The Man Who Made It Happen

The seminar would not have happened without Siyabonga Dlamini. He is an animal caregiver, not a mental health professional or an events coordinator, and yet he identified a need in the men around him and did something about it. More than that: he opened the morning by sharing some of himself.

Siya spoke from personal experience about growing up in a world that told boys to be strong and never paused to ask whether they actually were. He talked about how depression in men so often does not look like sadness; because sadness would be too visible, too easy to recognise. It looks like irritability. Like working longer and longer hours because stillness feels unbearable. Like the friend who used to call every week and then, quietly, stopped.

Siya also made a distinction that is easy to say and harder to internalise: “The strongest man,”he told the room, “is the one who speaks and looks for help.” Coming from someone who had clearly tested that claim against his own life, it landed with real weight.

He called on us to be men who ask the question directly. Not “how are you” as a greeting, but “how are you, really” as a genuine inquiry - and to ask it twice, because the first time often draws the performed answer. His challenge to us was simple: find someone who is struggling and be the person who asks.

A Canvas Worth More Than You Think

Anthony Noble spent 40 years teaching English and art in primary schools across the Eastern Cape and the Garden Route before retiring in 2021. He turned that retirement into a second career: Perisos Pottery, his studio in George, offers ten sessions pairing the making of clay vessels with life lessons drawn from decades in the classroom and a deep personal faith. He has taught a blind man to throw clay on a wheel. He has hosted a marriage proposal. He currently holds a brush steadier than most people half his age, all while fighting leukaemia and prostate cancer simultaneously.

He came to us not despite those diagnoses but, in part, because of them. The experience of receiving two life-altering phone calls in short succession - first leukaemia, then, the following morning, prostate cancer - had led him to a decision about what he was going to do with what remained of his life. He was going to live it, and he was going to tell others that they could too.

Anthony brought a canvas. He also brought oil paints, a palette knife, one single worn brush, and a stopwatch.

What followed was something genuinely unexpected and inspiring. In just over 34 minutes, while speaking the entire time (and reading scripture, sharing stories, answering questions) he painted a complete mountain landscape with water, cliffs, mist, and an aloe in the foreground. The room watched a blank canvas become something coherent and beautiful in real time.

That was the point. When he first showed us the canvas, unprimed and unmarked, he asked what we would pay for it. Two rand, someone offered. He named it. He applied the first brushstrokes. He returned to the question. By the end, the figure had changed considerably. The canvas had not. What had changed was what we understood it to be capable of becoming.

The men in the room were not an especially difficult crowd to connect this to.

What Was Said, and Why It Mattered

Both Siya and Anthony circled the same truths from different directions. That vulnerability is not the enemy of strength but its foundation. That you cannot recover from what you refuse to feel. That the men around us who go quiet, who withdraw, who fill every waking hour because sitting still is too dangerous, are sending a signal. That unaddressed trauma does not disappear with time; it changes shape into a short temper, a numbness, a difficulty with closeness that feels inexplicable to those closest to you.

Anthony spoke about forgiveness with the kind of clarity that only comes from having genuinely wrestled with it. He described unforgiveness as drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. He shared the story of an eight-year-old boy who heard this metaphor and immediately understood that he needed to forgive an absent father - a man he had never met, and who had left before he could form a memory of him. Five years of carried weightand only eight years old.

He also said something that is, for many men, the hardest thing to hear: "Asking for help is not the end of your strength. It is the beginning of it."

To the Men at Cango, and to Those Who Love Them

To the men who were in that room this morning: you were seen. Something honest happened today, and it cost some of the people in that room something to be part of it.

To the men who were not there, or who are reading this from further afield: the task is not complicated. Find one person you can be honest with. Not the performed version of fine but actually being honest. If that person does not exist yet, the resources below are a starting point.

And to the women, partners, families, and friends who have men in their lives: ask twice. Ask in a way that makes it safe to answer honestly. Do not wait for the man to bring it up himself, because for many men, the conditioning against doing exactly that runs very deep. The ones who go quiet are not always the ones who are coping. They are sometimes the ones who have concluded that no one will understand. Prove that wrong.

The silence is the signal. It has always been the signal.

Thank You

A genuine and heartfelt thank you to Siya for seeing a need in the people around him and doing something about it and for making this morning happen through nothing more than care and initiative. And to Anthony Noble, for bringing his art, his candour, his faith, and decades of hard-won wisdom to our community. To read more about him and his studio, Perisos Pottery, you can find him on Facebook.

Both men gave us something worth keeping today.

If You or Someone You Know Needs Support

South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG) The country's largest patient advocacy and mental health support group.

• 24-hour helpline: 0800 567 567

• Crisis text line: SMS 31393

• Website: www.sadag.org

Lifeline South Africa 24-hour support line offering counselling and crisis intervention.

• National helpline: 0861 322 322

• Website: www.lifeline.org.za