Mythical Black Father
Imagine you’re 10 years old and you’re asking your mother where your father went to.
I don’t know how black mothers do it. Not the raising a child(ren) alone part, the attempting to make them understand that their father does not want to be part of their lives part.
I was having a conversation with some friends in a whatsapp group chat a while back, and the issue of the absent black father came up. We’re all young black men in that group, and these type of conversations are a bit personal for some more than others. At least we talking about them, right?
The absent black father is a quite honestly an emotional burden most black South African kids have to carry, including me. Conversations regarding such things are quite taboo in black families though, swept under the carpet along with homosexuality and mental issues in the black community.
“According to some feminists, the only thing that black men have been consistent with besides patriarchy is emotional detachment.”
There is two causes that have been highlighted as initiating the “absent father gene” in black men; (1) Apartheid labour migrations (2) Warped patriarchal systems.
During apartheid, black men were forced to leave their families and go work in the mines, which were sometimes in other provinces. In the Eastern Cape, a large amount of the male labor force went to work in the gold mines of Johannesburg, and some in the North West.
Being away from home for long periods of time, from their families who couldn’t follow, because the men lived in hostel like accommodations, which was not suited for family rearing, allowed for the men to start new families where they were.
So starts the tragedy. I don’t need to go further into that, I think you get the picture.
Secondly, a warped patriarchal system added to the continued lack of attention to rearing their kids that has become part and parcel of black men.
According to some feminists, the only thing that black men have been consistent with besides patriarchy is emotional detachment. Now, creating norms and expectations of the male child as unaccountable because ‘boys will be boys’ has factored a lot into creating the type of men that have little to no regard for women in this current society.
It is hard enough growing up in certain parts of South Africa, now imagine doing it without both parents. This is not to say mothers have not done their part, and amazingly so, but in an ideal world they too would have some form of assistance from a father figure.
I often hoped that this phenomenon would end with the previous generation of fathers, but I think we’ve seen too many instances in this generation of young mothers were the young father “opts-out” of being a father.
Alas, hope springs eternal.
