African societies like to speak of themselves as communal.

We repeat this assertion with confidence: we are not like the West; we value family; we do not live alone. Solo living is often described as foreign, selfish, or evidence of moral decline.

And yet, if one looks closely at everyday life, a different reality appears.

Across towns and cities, people live alone not by choice, but by circumstance. Widows. Migrant workers. Single parents. Retirees. Survivors of war, disease, and displacement. Young professionals cut loose from kinship networks by urbanisation and economic pressure.

Solo living is everywhere — even as it is denied.

This contradiction is not accidental. It is structural.

To understand it, one must move beyond cultural slogans and examine history. Colonial rule systematically dismantled extended social systems through labour migration, land alienation, and the reorganisation of households around production rather than belonging. Men were moved. Women were left. Families were stretched across distance and time.

Postcolonial states did not reverse this logic. They deepened it.

Urbanisation accelerated without corresponding social infrastructure. Informal economies absorbed surplus labour without offering security. The state withdrew quietly from welfare, leaving individuals to improvise survival while continuing to speak the language of “community.”

What emerged was a peculiar arrangement: people were left to live alone, but denied the dignity of naming it.

Solo living became a silent condition — widely practiced, rarely acknowledged.

Those who lived alone were expected to explain themselves. Why not marry? Why not return home? Why not endure?

The burden of explanation fell on individuals, not on the structures that produced their isolation.

From the petrol station forecourt, this reality is visible daily. People arrive alone. They pay alone. They wait alone. Conversations are brief, polite, functional. Independence is performed not as freedom, but as competence under pressure.

This is not the loneliness of excess choice. It is the solitude of adaptation.

The mistake is to treat solo living as a moral or psychological problem. It is neither. It is a political and economic outcome. People live alone because systems no longer carry them collectively, even as rhetoric insists that they do.

The real issue is not whether solo living is good or bad. It is whether societies are willing to recognise and support the conditions they have created.

In this context, resilience is misunderstood. It is celebrated when it should be interrogated. People survive alone not because they are heroic, but because alternatives have quietly disappeared.

To tell these stories is not to glorify suffering. It is to restore accuracy.

Solo living in Africa is not a lifestyle trend waiting to be corrected. It is a widespread response to structural abandonment. When acknowledged and translated into public narrative, it becomes a source of learning rather than shame.

Knowledge does not reside only in institutions. It also resides in lives that have adapted quietly to reality.

If that knowledge remains private, societies continue to misdiagnose their own condition.

The forecourt teaches this without ceremony. People do not stop because they are weak. They stop because movement requires replenishment.

Those who live alone are not broken. They are responding rationally to the world as it is.

To understand them is to understand the systems we have built — and the ones we have failed to build.

—

Dr Petero translates examined and lived knowledge into public narratives such as books, audiobooks, and documentaries.

---