The focus on African masculinities has enabled us to question taken-for-granted assumptions of what it means to be an African, and also inhabit a masculine identity. The adoption of the South African Constitution signalled a shift in power, a shift in power that created a “crisis” in masculinities. Here then, women gaining economic and social freedom is experienced by men as their own demise. While the new South Africa created a space for human rights and the expression thereof, these expressions have to contend with traditional ways of conceiving masculinity, which is often at odds with the idea of gender and sexuality freedom as human rights. Here then, I am concerned about the local particularities of race, class, and other intersecting identities and social positions affecting the ways that masculinities are constructed and negotiated in post-apartheid South Africa. It is my contention that we cannot understand African masculinities without taking seriously colonialism and then apartheid in South Africa and how these systems have forged particular kinds of masculinities. Importantly then, African masculinities cannot be subsumed under western theories of manhood, theories that have historically only really read Africanness through what Achille Mbembe calls a “negative interpretation.”