In Durban last year, I nearly drowned.
A rip current yanked me under, pulling me further from shore. My arms flailed, my lungs burned, but no sound came out — only silence. A lifeguard dragged me back. I lived.
Too many South African men are never pulled out. They drown every day, not only in water, but in violence, silence and shame.
That moment gave me words for something I had lived through long before the water closed over my head. Years earlier, bullets from a hijacking tore through more than my flesh — they punctured the oxygen tank I had carried since childhood: the emotional numbness that kept me afloat after my father left. Numbness saved me once. Slowly, it began to drown me.
My story is not unique. It echoes an inheritance handed down to millions of South African children.
Apartheid’s drowning
Apartheid dispossessed more than land. It dispossessed fatherhood.
Pass laws turned the ordinary act of a black man walking beyond the boundaries the state had drawn for him into a crime. Migrant labour ripped fathers from homes and crammed them into hostels where tenderness could not breathe. The security state stamped black men as agitators, subversives, criminals — never as sons, never as husbands, never as fathers.
Masculinity was weaponised. Men were fed into mines where their bodies broke, armies where resistance was bloodied, prisons where dignity was crushed. At the same time, masculinity was criminalised: the black male body became a target for search, arrest and suspicion. To be a man was to be watched. To be a father was to be absent.
Apartheid’s race laws not only separated neighbourhoods — they separated families. A white father could not legally raise his black child. Mixed-race love was outlawed. Children born across the colour line were branded as a shame, not a blessing.
Fatherlessness was not an accident of apartheid. It was a policy outcome.
The Cape Flats still carry the scars. Forced removals scattered families. Jobs were stripped by racial quotas. Fathers were criminalised by race. Trauma carved a vacuum — and gangs rushed in, then took root. Today’s violence is not random chaos. It is the harvest of laws that broke homes by design.
Graveyards growing
The result: a generation of boys raised in the shadow of fathers silenced, jailed, outlawed or hardened into stone. That inheritance is alive today in every statistic and every unspoken scream:
- 64.5% of all South African children grow up without their fathers.
- For black children, that number rises to 70%.
- Men die younger than women, with life expectancy lagging five to seven years behind.
- In 2017, 87% of homicide victims were male — seven men killed for every woman.
- Young men aged 15-29 are killed at rates above 100 per 100,000, compared with just over 12 for women.
These are not statistics of “risk”. They are statistics of slaughter. And when men drown, women and children gasp for air. Every young man murdered leaves behind mothers, wives, sisters and children who carry the pain.
Globally, the World Health Organization reports that men account for almost 80% of homicide victims. But South Africa’s rates are among the highest in the world. The epidemic of male death is not universal fate — it is historical design meeting present neglect.
Suicide and silence
If violence kills men in public, silence kills them in private.
Suicide is one of South Africa’s most urgent but neglected health crises. In prisons, 37% of all deaths are suicides, with a suicide rate of 52 per 100,000 — more than four times the national average. Across the country, eight out of 10 people who die by suicide are men.
Yet suicide hides behind stigma. Trauma is dismissed as witchcraft. Depression is mocked as weakness. Men learn that their pain is illegitimate unless expressed in violence. Despair either explodes or implodes — there is no middle ground for healing.
I think of my childhood friend, Mxo. He lost his father at 12, his mother shortly after, and then the insurance payout meant for his schooling was stolen by his uncle.
“I can never forgive him,” he told me. “They say, ‘Get over it, God sees.’ But where was God when this happened?”
His first suicide attempt was dismissed as attention seeking. His second succeeded. He left behind a son destined to inherit the same cycle of fatherlessness.
Like me in the Durban sea, he was thrashing beneath the surface. But unlike me, no one pulled him out.
A half-built nation
Instead of facing this crisis, we import ideological battles from elsewhere. In America, politics is sold in blue-versus-red bundles. Choose one: equality or family, women or men. But South Africa cannot afford bundles that separate dignity.
When men are excluded from healing, daughters grow up without defenders, sisters carry brothers’ burdens, wives are left in poverty. To uplift women while ignoring men is to build half a nation. And a half-built nation cannot stand.
Globally, societies that invest in male health and education see ripple effects in safety, productivity and family stability. Ignoring men is not a progressive stance — it is a blind spot that costs lives.
Heritage beyond kraal and cattle
This Heritage Month, we will celebrate cattle, kraals, beadwork and song. But heritage is more than artefacts. It is presence, protection and compassion.
What will our children inherit? Graves of young men — or communities where fathers are present, sons are protected, brothers are healed and daughters thrive in safety?
True heritage is not only in cattle counts or kraal walls. It is in whether we build homes where children know a father’s embrace, and communities where men’s silence is broken.
Breaking the silence
There are no quick fixes. But silence is no longer an option.
- Policy: Men’s health and safety must become central to public health. Clinics, schools, workplaces and prisons should target boys and men with real support.
- Culture: Communities must break the shame that dismisses trauma as weakness. Masculinity must be disentangled from violence and silence.
- Faith and civil society: Churches, mosques, NGOs and community groups must build spaces where men can speak and heal. Silence kills. Conversation saves.
- Corporate SA: Companies must invest in spaces where men can speak before they break. Employee assistance programmes must move beyond generic counselling to tackle fatherhood, masculinity, stress and purpose. When men are supported at work, families and communities reap the benefit.
- Media: The narrative must shift. Men are not disposable bodies. They are bearers of dignity. Report their pain with urgency, not only their violence.
Jumping in
That day in Durban, a lifeguard pulled me out. My lungs burned, but I lived.
South African men are drowning in violence, silence, and shame. The question is not whether men are drowning.
The question is — who among us will jump in? DM