My last piece drew just two quiet comments on the Daily Maverick site — but more than 2,000 on Facebook, most of them angry, mocking or dismissive. The contrast could not have been starker.
On Daily Maverick, a mother of boys wrote: “This moves me in the deepest places.” Another reader thanked me: “South African men are associated with violence but nobody asks the question why, let alone dealing with those issues.”
But on Facebook, the post became a battlefield. More than 2,000 comments piled up — and counting. Angry faces swarmed the thread. One man typed: “After 1,000 years it will still be apartheid’s fault.” Another shot back: “Man up. It’s all about choice.” Others dragged in America, or demanded: “What did majority rule fix?” The laughter emojis kept rolling.
It was noisy, scornful, even mocking — but beneath the noise lay something deeper. The fury revealed a question South Africa has yet to answer: Are absent fathers simply the product of bad choices, or the harvest of history? My answer is uncomfortable but necessary — both are true.
The global and the local
Critics are right about one thing — fatherlessness is not uniquely South African. America grapples with fractured families. So do parts of Africa and Europe. But every nation has its own roots of rupture.
In the United States, you cannot talk about African American fatherlessness without slavery and Jim Crow, which ripped families apart. In South Africa, you cannot talk about fatherlessness without apartheid — a system that designed absence. Pass laws, migrant labour, and forced removals were not background noise. They were deliberate policies that tore fathers from homes and outlawed black family life.
To say “fatherlessness is global” is like saying “hunger is global”. True — but meaningless unless you face the cause in each place. In Somalia, hunger may be driven by drought and conflict. In Venezuela, it stems from political collapse and economic mismanagement. In America, it is linked to poverty and food deserts. In Gaza, it comes through bombardment and displacement. The result is the same — families left hungry — but the roots differ. Fatherlessness works the same way: the surface looks similar across nations, but the reasons run deep and remain painfully specific to each context.
The choice argument
Other critics insisted: “Stop blaming history. Men walked away. It’s all about choice.”
Again — there is truth here. Today, no law forces a man to abandon his child. Responsibility is real. Every father makes a decision.
But choice does not exist in a vacuum. A miner who spent 11 months a year in a hostel did not abandon his family the way a suburban father might. A mother raising children alone because her husband was jailed or banned did not “choose” single motherhood. These were choices distorted by policy and trauma.
I once met a retired miner in Pietermaritzburg who had returned home after decades of isolation from his family. Grey in his beard but stooped from years underground, he told me quietly: “I missed all of my children’s first steps. Eleven months gone, one month home — what kind of father is that?” He didn’t speak with self-pity but with the flat weariness of someone whose family was engineered to survive without him.
His absence was not a suburban whim; it was state policy. By the time he came home for good, the children he barely knew had grown up repeating the same absence in different forms. This is how cycles embed themselves — not only through individual weakness, but through history’s architecture of separation.
To recognise this is not to excuse present neglect. It is to explain why cycles repeat — and why breaking them requires more than moral lectures.
Apartheid fatigue
Some comments carried a familiar refrain: “It’s been 30 years — stop blaming apartheid.”
But trauma does not run on expiry dates. Ask indigenous Australians if dispossession ended in 1901. Ask Holocaust survivors’ grandchildren if anti-Semitism ended in 1945. Apartheid’s echo still rings in South Africa’s homes.
We see it in the numbers: 64.5% of South African children grow up without fathers, according to Stats SA (2021). For black children, that number rises to 70%. South Africa has among the highest rate of fatherlessness in sub-Saharan Africa. The Cape Flats still carry gang cultures seeded by forced removals. Hostels still house men in conditions built for division, not family.
Naming this is not indulgence. It is truth. Denial is not maturity — it is amnesia.
Present failures
Others pointed at the ANC: “What did majority rule fix?”
Here too, they are right. Corruption and mismanagement have compounded the wound. The government has rarely prioritised fatherhood or male mental health. But present failure does not erase past design — it deepens the crisis. We are living in the overlap of history unhealed and governance unfinished.
The redemptive road
So where do we go from here?
- Truth-telling — We must name what was done. Apartheid dispossessed fatherhood. Migrant labour tore families apart. To deny this is to insult the living memory of millions.
- Personal responsibility — Every man today faces a choice. To be present, faithful and nurturing is not weakness — it is rebellion against history.
- Community support — Mentorship, rites of passage, men’s groups, churches, mosques, NGOs — we need spaces where men can speak before they break. Silence kills. Conversation saves.
- Policy and corporate action — Clinics, schools and prisons must target boys and men with fatherhood and mental-health programmes. Corporate SA must stop seeing men only as workers, and start supporting them as fathers.
- National acknowledgement — Perhaps we need a collective voice: “We are sorry. It should never have happened. You did not deserve it.” That alone won’t fix families, but it opens the road.
Together, not apart
South Africa cannot heal in fragments. Black pain cannot heal without white acknowledgement. White guilt cannot be released without black forgiveness. Men cannot heal without women’s partnership. Women cannot be free without men’s transformation.
The trolls asked: “When will you stop blaming apartheid?”
The better question is: “When will we start healing together?”
Heritage and legacy
South Africans often talk about “heritage” in terms of culture, food and celebration. But heritage is also what we inherit — the stories, strengths and wounds handed down to us. Some inherit land, some inherit language, and too many inherit fatherlessness. The challenge before us is to decide what heritage we will leave: cycles repeated, or cycles broken.
Breaking cycles, building futures
Fatherlessness is both global and local. It is both historical and personal. It is both a wound inherited and a choice made.
South Africa does not need more denial. It needs more fathers — fathers who admit the past, show up in the present, and break cycles for the future.
With the highest rate of fatherlessness in sub-Saharan Africa, we cannot afford more silence. History matters. Choices matter. The future will be decided by our willingness to hold both in our hands — and walk the long road of healing together. DM