I came across a video the other day. I watched about a minute of it, perhaps less. A woman was being interviewed, and she said, with the unshakeable certainty of someone who has already settled the matter in her own mind, that she has no use for a man who cannot slaughter a cow or a goat. I stopped the video there, because I had heard enough, though what I heard was not what she said. What I heard was the question beneath the words, the one she posed without posing it: what is the measure of a man?

It is a question that has been answered a thousand times and settled never. Every generation and every culture has offered its own answer, and each has been certain enough of itself to dismiss the others. The woman in the video had her answer, and I will give it to her freely. If the ability to take a blade to an animal and prepare it for sustenance is the standard by which she evaluates a man’s worth, that is her prerogative. Preferences are sovereign territory; I have neither the authority nor the inclination to contest them. But the question she stirred is worth sitting with, because I think it touches on something far older and far more contested than one woman’s criteria for a suitable partner.

There is an old poem, often recited, rarely attributed with any certainty, that attempts an answer. Its thesis is simple: the measure of a man lies in what he gave, how he lived, whether he befriended those in genuine need, how many were sorry when he passed. It is a gentle reckoning, almost pastoral in its simplicity, and it carries a certain beauty. The poem asks us to look past the newspaper sketch, past the creed and the church, and into the substance of a life as it was actually lived, not as it was performed. By this reckoning, the measure is relational: you are what you meant to the people around you, particularly those who stood to gain nothing from you. Someone once put it more bluntly: you can easily judge the character of a person by how they treat those who can do nothing for them.

There is truth in that, but there is also a deeper inquiry, one that takes us beyond behaviour observed and into character tested.

Plato, through his brother Glaucon, proposed a thought experiment in the second book of the Republic. Imagine, Glaucon says, a ring that can render its wearer invisible. With such a ring, a man could do anything he wished without consequence: steal, kill, seduce, deceive. The walls of accountability would dissolve entirely. The question the thought experiment raises is whether people act virtuously because virtue is intrinsically good, or merely because they fear the consequences of being caught. Glaucon, playing the devil’s advocate, argues that any rational person, given the ring, would abandon justice immediately. Justice, he suggests, is merely a social contract entered into by people too weak to get away with injustice.

Socrates spends the remainder of the Republic trying to prove Glaucon wrong: that the just soul is harmonious, that justice is its own reward, that the person who does good even when no one is watching is happier, more whole, than the person who cheats unseen. Whether Socrates succeeds is a matter of philosophical debate that has persisted for two and a half millennia. What is beyond debate is the power of the question itself.

A sufficiently powerful person can do terrible things to people and face no meaningful consequences. The mechanisms of accountability that restrain ordinary citizens (public opinion, legal sanction, social cost) bend and buckle under the weight of concentrated power. The powerful man who abuses his employees and takes what he wants because he can is rarely invisible in the literal sense. He is invisible in the functional sense: his transgressions are seen but tolerated, reported but unpunished, known but politely unspoken. Power, therefore, does not conceal the act; it neutralises the consequence. As Plato understood, power becomes the most reliable diagnostic of character. Give a man enough power to act without repercussion, and you will learn what he is made of. Not what he says he is. Not what he posts about being. Not the curated version of himself he performs for an audience. What he actually is, when the room is empty and the consequences are gone.

We all know such men. Some of us work for them. Some of us voted for them. Some of us are related to them, and some of us, if we are honest enough to admit it, have been that man.

This is one measure. It is a good measure. But it is a measure that belongs to a particular philosophical tradition, one that prizes individual moral autonomy and the examined life. It is a measure born in Athens, refined in the Enlightenment, and globalised through the machinery of Western intellectual dominance. It is a useful measure, but it is one measure among several, and to treat it as the only measure is to make a mistake that many of us, particularly those of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s in southern Africa, have already made in another domain.

I think of our fathers. The men who raised us, or more precisely, the men who worked so that we could be raised. For most of us who grew up in that era, love was expressed in a vocabulary that the contemporary world has largely abandoned. Our fathers did not tell us they loved us. They did not hug us and affirm their affection in words. They did not sit in the parents’ gallery at school sports days or choir recitals. What they did was wake up before dawn and walk into a back-breaking factory job or a market stall in the dust, day after day, year after year, so that the roof above our heads remained intact, the school fees were paid, and the plates at supper had something on them. Their absence from the gallery was itself an act of presence: they were at work, earning the right for us to be there at all. That was the declaration. That was the love letter. We understood it fluently, because we inhabited the same grammar.

There was no ambiguity. You did not need your father to say “I love you” when his body said it every morning at five o’clock as he laced his boots in the dark. You did not need a hug when his calloused hands placed food on the table that his labour had paid for. The vocabulary was sacrifice, provision, endurance, presence through persistence. It was a language spoken in actions so consistent and so costly that words would have been redundant.

Yet here is what troubles me. That same man, that same father, transplanted into the psychological lexicon of the present day, becomes a case study in dysfunction. He is “avoidant.” He is “emotionally unavailable.” He is “emotionally detached” or “non-demonstrative.” The diagnostic apparatus of Western therapeutic culture, imported wholesale and applied without cultural translation, looks at this man and sees pathology where his children saw devotion. These tools, developed by Western researchers, normed on Western populations, validated in Western institutional settings, have been exported to the rest of the world as though they describe a universal human attribute rather than a culturally specific set of behavioural preferences. When an African man expresses love through labour and provision rather than verbal affirmation and physical touch, he is operating within a legitimate emotional framework. He is literate in a language that the Five Love Languages industry has never bothered to learn, because learning it would require admitting that the product they are selling is cultural, particular, and limited, rather than universal, scientific, and complete.

I want to hold the nuance carefully here, because this is a place where the argument can be lost to sentimentality. Some of those fathers were, in fact, distant in ways that caused real damage. Some used stoicism as a shield behind which cruelty or indifference could hide unchallenged. The silence of the strong provider and the silence of the absent father can look identical from the outside, and the children who lived with the latter are entitled to name their experience without being told they misunderstood it. Both things can be true: that an entire generation’s mode of expressing love was valid and legible within its own context, and that some individual men within that generation used the cultural cover of stoicism to avoid the harder work of genuine emotional presence. The blanket pathologising of an entire generation’s love language is a kind of intellectual violence; but so is the blanket romanticising of it.

What I refuse to accept, however, is the lazy assumption that the Western therapeutic model is the neutral standard against which all other expressions of love must be evaluated. That is colonialism wearing a cardigan and holding a feelings wheel.

What connects these threads (the video, the poem, the fathers, the ring) is that every attempt to define the measure of a man is also an attempt to define the culture doing the measuring. The woman in the video was measuring practicality, competence, the ability to sustain life in its most literal, visceral form. The poem measures relational generosity, the footprint a man leaves in the hearts of others. Our fathers measured themselves by endurance and provision. Plato measured by the soul’s behaviour in the absence of external constraint. Each measure reveals as much about the society that produced it as it does about the man being measured.

Perhaps, then, the question is not “what is the measure of a man?” Perhaps the more honest question is: whose ruler are you using? Does the man being measured even recognise the units?

I do not have a sure answer, and I am suspicious of anyone who does. If forced to answer, I would say this: the measure of a man is most visible at the point where his power exceeds his accountability, where his capacity to act outstrips any consequence for acting badly. At that frontier, where Glaucon’s ring sits heavy on the finger and the world looks the other way, the man who still chooses rightly, who still does good for good’s sake, who still honours the dignity of people who can offer him nothing in return, that man has passed a test that most of us will never be asked to take.

The father who woke at five in the morning, not because anyone was watching, not because anyone would praise him, but because the children needed to eat and the fees needed paying, was wearing the ring too. He just did not know it had a name. He had the power to disappear, the way so many men did and still do, into the anonymity of a city that asks no questions. He had the ring on his finger every single day, and every single day, he chose to stay. He chose the factory. He chose the dirty market. He chose us. In my view, that is the true measure of a man. Not what he said about love, but what love cost him, and whether he paid it anyway.

Perhaps the lady in the video would disagree. She has her own ruler, her own units, her own grammar. That is her right, but if we have learned anything from the question she raised, it is this: the measure of a man has never been a fact, and I doubt it ever will be. What it has always been, though, is an argument. The only dishonesty is pretending it has been settled.