Dear Shadaya: A Letter About the Mothers You Mock — and the Manhood You Mistook
An open Couch Conversation to a young man who has built a living by demeaning single mothers — and to every Zimbabwean watching. Let us talk, warmly but honestly, about why the “manosphere” needs a woman to blame, how the algorithm pays men to be cruel, the single mothers rising to answer back, and the simple truth our grandmothers knew: a man who makes war on women makes war on the very womb that carried him. This one is for vana Amai.
Pull Up a Chair — This One Is Personal
Today I am not reaching for charts and policy first. Today I want to talk, the way we talk on a Sunday afternoon when something has been sitting heavy on the heart. Lately a wave of open letters has been circulating — ordinary Zimbabweans writing to the influencer known as Shadaya, asking him to stop the way he speaks about single mothers. One of them said it plainly: every time you mock these women, you are not debating a “topic,” you are talking about real women who rise at 5am when the baby is sick, who stretch five dollars to feed three mouths, who carry the role of both mother and father without applause. I read it, and I knew the Couch had to host this conversation.
So let me be clear about my spirit here. This is not hatred answering hatred. I hold no wish to harm this young man; I would, in fact, like to see him healed of whatever made cruelty feel like a career. But I love our mothers and daughters too much to stay quiet, and I love our young men too much to let them be taught that this is strength. So we will be warm, and we will be honest, and we will not flinch. Let us understand the machine first — then we will talk, man to conscience, about whose son he is.
First — What Is the “Manosphere”?
To answer something, you must first see it clearly. The “manosphere” is a loose web of online communities and influencers that researchers describe as promoting male supremacy and anti-feminism — portraying feminism as dangerous, women as manipulative, and men as the real victims of modern life. It is not one club; it wears many coats. Let us name them simply, so no big word can hide the plain meaning.
“Red Pill” & “Alpha Male”
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“Taking the red pill” means believing you have woken up to a hidden truth — that society secretly favours women and men must fight back. The “alpha male” pose sells dominance as the only real manhood. It flatters a hurting young man into feeling superior, then sells him the lifestyle.
MGTOW & “Passport Bros”
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MGTOW (“Men Going Their Own Way”) swear off women and marriage entirely. “Passport Bros” travel to poorer countries hoping to find women they imagine will be more “submissive.” Both treat women not as equals to love, but as a problem to escape or a product to source.
The Cruel Vocabulary
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Watch the words, for words reveal the heart. A woman’s beloved children become “baggage.” A single mother is dismissed as an “alpha widow.” A good man who loves and supports a single mother is mocked for a “save-a-hoe complex.” This is language built to dehumanise — to turn living women and innocent children into insults.
The “Hypergamy” Myth
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They claim single motherhood is simply the “consequence” of women choosing exciting “bad boys” over stable men — so she deserves her struggle. It is a tidy myth that erases every real story: the man who left, the man who died, the man who abused, the widow, the survivor. Reality is messy; the myth is cruel and simple.
Why They Need a Woman to Blame
Here is the question worth sitting with: why this fixation on single mothers, of all people? Why return, again and again, to the women with perhaps the least power and the heaviest load? The answer, researchers of these movements tell us, is older than the internet — it is the ancient, sad logic of the scapegoat.
Studies of the manosphere describe it as a space that does two things at once: it validates a man’s personal grievances, then redirects his frustration toward a target. A young man may be genuinely hurting — jobless, lonely, unsure how to be a man in a changing world. That pain is real. But instead of healing it, these influencers repackage it: they take his structural problems — no work, no prospects, a hard economy — and rebrand them as a personal failure caused by women and feminism. The scholars call it turning “structural marginalisation into personal failure.” It is a magic trick. It points a struggling man’s anger away from the systems that failed him and toward the nurse, the vendor, the single mother down the road who is struggling just as hard.
And there is a colder layer beneath the psychology: money. Because cruelty, it turns out, pays very well online. Which brings us to the machine.
The Algorithm Pays Men to Be Cruel
If you understand only one thing about why this man says what he says, understand this: he is not mainly trying to convince you. He is trying to provoke you. Researchers have a name for it — “rage-baiting” — deliberately posting something outrageous to trigger an emotional storm, because the storm is the product.
How the trap works, step by step
Social media platforms reward content that keeps people reacting. When a post makes thousands of people furious enough to comment, share and quote it, the recommendation algorithm reads that fury as “this is important — show it to more people.” Outrage spreads faster and wider than kindness ever does. More outrage means more views, more views mean more advertising money and more followers to sell courses and “retreats” to. As the studies put it bluntly: emotional content signals relevance to the algorithm, which then pushes it to even more users. The cruelty is not a side effect. It is the business model.
A Zimbabwean woman, watching one such influencer’s following collapse after a flopped paid retreat, said it with devastating clarity: “That guy only eats because he insults women, especially single mothers.” She named the whole economy in one sentence. The mothers he mocks are, quite literally, the meal — their dignity sold for clicks, their pain converted into his rent. When you share his post in anger, even to condemn it, the machine counts your outrage as applause and pays him for it. That is the cruellest part of the trap: it turns our love for our mothers into fuel for the man attacking them.
What He Actually Said — for the Record
Let me be fair and factual, because truth does not need exaggeration. This is not invented; it is his own public posting, reported across Zimbabwean and international media. The self-described anti-feminist has, among other things, publicly written that being involved with a single mother “is no different from being in a polygamy”; advised young men to date only women aged 18 to 25 because they are supposedly more “submissive” and easier to control; and counselled men to “never date single mothers” and to avoid even women “raised by single mothers.” He once went globally viral mocking a new father — a celebrated artist — as “emasculated” for carrying his own child, a post that chased some 61 million views. By his own account in interviews, he makes his living from social media.
I set these down not to amplify them, but so no one can say we are being unfair to a misunderstood man. The words are his. The pattern is consistent. And the target is always the same: women, and most often the women already carrying the most. A man is free to hold opinions. But to industrialise the humiliation of mothers for money is not “opinion” — it is harm with a price tag.
The Mothers Are Answering Back
Now for the part that fills my heart, because this story is not one of helpless victims. All across the world and here at home, women — and good men beside them — are rising to answer this cruelty, and they are winning more often than the loud voices admit.
Remember that flopped “men’s getaway” retreat — hyped loudly online, then barely attended, mocked even by the influencer’s own peers. That is the quiet truth the rage-bait hides: the real-life following is far smaller than the online noise. Most Zimbabwean men love and honour their mothers, sisters and wives, and have no appetite for this. The cruelty is loud, but it is not the majority. And the global institutions have woken up too: as the world marks thirty years since the Beijing Declaration on women’s rights, UN Women has formally sounded the alarm over online misogyny, naming the algorithms that reward it and calling for a broad coalition to push back. The tide of women telling their own stories — unapologetically, in their own voices — is rising faster than any one influencer can shout.
The Rights of Vana Amai — and Who Can Defend Them
You asked the question many Zimbabweans are asking: if this is harm, can anyone actually stop it? Can the Human Rights Commission act — and if the law is slow, can our Mambos, our traditional leaders, stand up for the rights of vana Amai? Let us answer honestly, because false promises help no one.
What the law already says
Our Constitution is not silent. Section 80 declares that every woman has “full and equal dignity of the person with men.” Section 56 guarantees equal treatment. And — this is the powerful one — Section 80(3) states that all laws, customs, traditions and cultural practices that infringe the rights of women are void to the extent of the infringement. In other words, no man may hide cruelty behind “culture”: our supreme law has already ruled that any “tradition” used to degrade women carries no authority at all. Beyond the Constitution, the Zimbabwe Gender Commission is empowered to receive complaints from the public, investigate violations of gender rights, and even recommend prosecution. The Cyber and Data Protection Act now criminalises online harassment and cyberbullying, and Zimbabwe’s National Strategy to Prevent and Address Gender-Based Violence (2023–2030) explicitly names technology-facilitated abuse as a growing threat.
Can the Mambos defend vana Amai?
Here is where our own tradition is stronger than the statute book. A Mambo, a sabhuku, an elder — these are the custodians of unhu, the keepers of how we treat one another. They cannot police the internet, and we should not pretend they can arrest a man for a tweet. But their power was never mainly the power to punish — it was the power to define what is honourable. And that power is enormous. When chiefs and elders stand up in the dare and in the community and declare plainly that a man who builds wealth by degrading mothers has shamed himself and his lineage — that he is not the “alpha” he claims but a disgrace to the very idea of murume — they reach something the Cyber Act cannot: the conscience, and the reputation. Encouragingly, our traditional and religious leaders already sit in the national coalition against gender-based violence; they were there at the 2025 national GBV symposium. Let them now turn that authority to the digital age — naming online cruelty toward women as the dishonour it is, restoring to vana Amai the place our culture always gave them. For in true Zimbabwean tradition, the mother is not “less than.” She is sacred. Musha mukadzi — the home itself is the woman.
Dear Shadaya — Whose Son Are You?
So now, young man, let me talk to you directly, not as an enemy but as a tete who has watched too many of our brilliant boys sell their souls cheap. I will not call you names; the work you do already speaks loudly enough about the state of a heart. I want to ask you something quieter, and harder.
When you call a single mother “less than,” you are describing the woman who carried you for nine months and laboured to bring you here. Whatever your home looked like, a woman bled to give you life.
When you teach men to despise women who raise children alone, you are speaking to your own sister — who may, through no fault of her own, become a single mother one day through death, abandonment or escape from harm. Would you have the world spit on her?
When you sell this cruelty for a living, you are training your own future daughters to accept being spoken to like that by men — because their father did it, and called it strength, and ate from it.
That is the inheritance this path leaves, and it does not stay online. There is a Shona question our elders ask of a man like this: murume anoswera achituka vana Amai pa-internet, tingati murume here? — a man who spends his days insulting mothers on the internet, can we truly call him a man? Because in our culture, manhood — unhu hwemurume — was never measured by how many women you could make small. It was measured by how many people you could protect, provide for, and lift. The strongest man in the village was the one the widows and the struggling mothers could run to, not the one they had to hide from. You have inverted the whole meaning. You have taken the sacred word “alpha” and used it to describe a man whose great achievement is making vulnerable women cry for applause from strangers.
And hear this plainly, because it is already true: the movement you profit from is now studied in universities and child-safeguarding trainings around the world as a case study in how online misogyny radicalises young men and harms women and girls. Sit with that. Your “legacy” is becoming a warning in someone’s classroom — an example of what a society must learn to recognise and refuse. That is what you are building: not a kingdom, but a cautionary tale.
But I do not write to condemn you to it, because I believe even this can be turned. You clearly have a gift for words and an audience that listens — imagine if you used it to build our young men instead of poisoning them; to teach them to honour, provide, and protect; to become the kind of man a good woman is glad to find. That would take more courage than cruelty ever did. The door is open. But until you walk through it, know that the mothers you mock are held in higher honour by their Creator, their ancestors and their children than a thousand viral posts could ever buy. Vana Amai, we see you. We thank you. We stand with you. And to the men watching: be the brother in the dare who says “not in my presence.” That is the real alpha. Pamberi navana Amai vedu — forward with our mothers, held high.
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