In 2007 I began a study of a group of adolescent boys growing up in the South African township of Alexandra. Alex, as it is known, was established in 1912 and as such is one of the oldest townships in the country. It is situated just north-east of Johannesburg, close to the affluent suburb of Sandton, and the majority of those who live there are working-class people. The place is overcrowded and under-serviced, and poverty, violence and crime are rife.

My subjects (participants) were all schoolboys between the ages of 13 and 18 at the time I began to get to know them. The boys were from different schools. Some knew each other but were not close friends. My plan was to conduct a longitudinal study, with the main aim being to explore how adolescent boys negotiate their transition to adulthood in the context of a township, and in doing so observe how they understand what it means to be a ‘real’ man and whether definitions of masculinity might be static, changing or fluid. I followed them over a period of close on 12 years (2007 to 2018) so that by the time of the conclusion of my study they were all young adults between 24 and 28 years old.

After the first phase of data collection in 2007, I then followed 12 of the boys over the next nearly 12 years, conducting between 6 and 18 individual follow-up interviews with each of them. Eleven of the 12 completed high school (one dropped out in Grade 11) and four completed tertiary-level diplomas. At the time of writing, 10 of the participants were working, one was unemployed and one was in prison.

The field of study – boys and masculinity – is not new. Broadly, it may be characterised as the study of male experience, but this varies according to a specific context and across socio-historical-cultural formations. What is relatively new, however, is what ongoing contemporary research in many parts of the world has revealed. This is that the stereotyped ideas that have dictated what it means to be a man are changing. Certain groups of boys in the world today are not engaging in risk-taking and other problematic behaviours as part of constructing their masculine identities. Instead they are promoting different kinds of masculine ideals.