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Contents
editorial
KEVIN DAVIDSON
“Soulbrother #1”
TESHOME GABRIEL
Ruin and The Other: Towards a Language Of Memory
MLADEN DOLAR
Singing in Pursuit of the Object Voice
Theme Graham Newcater
STEPHANUS MULLER
Sapphires and serpents: In Search of Graham Newcater
ARYAN KAGANOF
Of Fictalopes and Jictology (2018)
MEGAN-GEOFFREY PRINS
Toccata for Piano (2012): The gift of newness
OLGA LEONARD
The Leonard Street Meetings (2008-2012)
ARYAN KAGANOF
Her first concert - 15 October 2011
STEPHANUS MULLER & GRAHAM NEWCATER
Interview (2008, transcribed 2010)
AMORÉ STEYN
The Properties of the Raka Tone Row as seen within the Context of other Newcaterian Rows
STEPHANUS MULLER
The Island
GRAHAM NEWCATER
CONCERTO in E Minor Op. 5 (1958)
ARNOLD VAN WYK
A Letter from Upper Orange Street, 14th June 1958
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Concert Overture Op. 8 (1962-3)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Variations For Orchestra Op 11 (1963)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Nr.1 Klange An Thalia Myers (1964)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Allegretto e Espressivo (1966)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Variations de Timbres (1967)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
String Quartet (1983/4)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Songs of the Inner Worlds (1991)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
ETUDE I For Horn with Piano Accompaniment (2012)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
ETUDE II For Horn with Piano Accompaniment (2012)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
SONATINA for Pianoforte (2014)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
CANTO for Pianoforte (2015)
LIZABÉ LAMBRECHTS
The DOMUS Graham Newcater Collection Catalogue
galleri
TAFADZWA MICHAEL MASUDI
Waiting For A Better Tomorrow
ILZE WOLFF
Summer Flowers
NIKKI FRANKLIN
Sans Visage
BAMBATHA JONES
Below the Breadline
TRACY PAYNE
Veiled
STAN ENGELBRECHT
Miss Beautiful
ALEKSANDAR JEVTIĆ
We Are The Colour of Magnets and also Their Doing
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Augenmusik & Some Tarot Cards
EUGENE SKEEF
Monti wa Marumo!
borborygmus
PASCALE OBOLO
Electronic Protest Song As Resistance Through the Creation of Sound
AXMED MAXAMED & MATHYS RENNELA
A Conversation on the Bleaching of Techno: How Appropriation is Normalized and Preserved
FANA MOKOENA
A problem of classification
PHIWOKAZI QOZA
Choreographies of Protest Performance:
MASIXOLE MLANDU
On Fatherhood in South Africa
VULANE MTHEMBU
We are ancestors in our lifetime – AI and African data
TIMBAH
All My Homies Hate Skrillex – a story about what happened with dubstep
TETA DIANA
Three Sublime Songs
LAWRENCE KRAMER
Circle Songs
NEIL TENNANT
Euphoria?
frictions
LYNTHIA JULIUS
Vyf uit die Kroes
NGOMA HILL
This Poem Is Free
MSIZI MOSHOETSI
Five Poems
ABIGAIL GEORGE
Another Green World
OMOSEYE BOLAJI
People of the Townships
RIAAN OPPELT
The Escape
DIANA FERRUS
Daai Sak
KUMKANI MTENGWANA
Two Poems
VADIM FILATOV
Azsacra: Nihilism of Dancing Comets, The Destroyer of the Destroyers
claque
ZAKES MDA
Culture And Liberation Struggle In South Africa: From Colonialism To Apartheid (Edited By Lebogang Lance Nawa)
MPHUTHUMI NTABENI
The Promise of genuine literary stylistic innovation
ZUKISWA WANNER
[BR]OTHER – Coffee table snuff porn, or...?
SEAN JACOBS
Davy Samaai The People's Champion
KNEO MOKGOPA
I Still See The Sun/ The Dukkha Economy
CHRISTINE LUCIA
Resonant Politics, Opera and Music Theatre out of Africa
ARI SITAS
The Muller’s Parable
ZIMASA MPEMNYAMA
CULTURE Review: The Lives of Black Folk
RIAAN OPPELT
Club Ded: psychedelic noir in Cape Town
DYLAN VALLEY
Nonfiction not non-fiction (not yet)
DEON MAAS
MUTANT - a crucial documentary film by Nthato Mokgata and Lebogang Rasethaba
GEORGE KING
Unknown, Unclaimed, and Unloved: Rehabilitating the Music of Arnold Van Wyk
THOMAS ROME
African Art As Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, And The Idea Of Negritude. By Souleymane Bachir Diagne.
SIMBARASHE NYATSANZA
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Making Africa visible in an upside-down World
ekaya
BRIDGET RENNIE-SALONEN & YVETTE HARDIE
Creating a healthy arts sector ecosystem: The Charter of Rights for South African Artists
KOPANO RATELE
What Use Would White Students Have For African Psychology?
NICKI PRIEM
The Hidden Years of South African Music
INGE ENGELBRECHT
“Die Kneg” – pastor Simon Seekoei in conversation.
SCORE-MAKERS
Score-making
off the record
BARBARA BOSWELL
Writing as Activism: A History of Black South African Women’s Writing
MPHUTLANE WA BOFELO
MUSIC AS THE GOSPEL OF LIBERATION: Religio-Spiritual Symbolism and Invocation of Martyrs of Black Consciousness in the Azanian Freedom Songs
IGNATIA MADALANE
From Paul to Penny: The Emergence and Development of Tsonga Disco (1985-1990s) Pt.2
ADAM GLASSER
In Search of Mr. Paljas
TREVOR STEELE TAYLOR
Censorship, Film Festivals and the Temperature at which Artworks and their Creators Burn
PATRIC TARIQ MELLET
The Camissa Museum – A Decolonial Camissa African Centre of Memory and Understanding @ The Castle of Good Hope
IKERAAM KORANA
The Episteme of the Elders
OLU OGUIBE
Fela Kuti
MICHAEL TAUSSIG
Walter Benjamin’s Grave
ANTHONY BURGESS
On the voice of Joyce
feedback
FRÉDÉRIC SALLES
This is not a burial, it’s a resurrection : Cinema without the weight of perfection.
FACEBOOK FEEDBACK
Social Media Responses to herri 5
the selektah
boeta gee
Hoor Hoe Lekker Slat’ie Goema - (An ode to the spirit of the drum)
PhD
MARY RÖRICH
Graham Newcater's Orchestral Works: Case Studies in the Analysis of Twelve-Tone Music
hotlynx
shopping
contributors
the back page
DANIEL MARTIN
Stuttering From The Anus
© 2023
Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute
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    #06
  • borborygmus

MASIXOLE MLANDU

On Fatherhood in South Africa

In one of the works of Mbe Mbhele, he invites us to a poignant meditation on what to do with broken things: “Do we let go of them or do we mend them? If we do mend them are the cracks not going to be a reminder of how dangerous one can be? What does that reminder mean and what are its consequences?”

Taking Mbe Mbhele’s words to heart, what do we do with fathers who have broken us? Do we let go of or mend our relations with them? Then, are the cracks not going to be a reminder of how dangerous one can be? In the end, we should strive for peace even amid to blackness as a lived impossibility; while also questioning if there is any room for us to heal from the traumas of being fatherless as result of structural challenges impacting upon us, black people.

Where does one begin to write about fathers, whose existence in our lives is minimal if not non-existent? Do we write them off as unethical men who ran away from their responsibility or write about them from a position of anger and frustration, that our fathers zizinja (dogs) who abandoned us, as some of us were told by our mothers every time we asked ‘Uphi utata?’ (Where is my father?) Should we become typical liberals in university corridors who, during their seminars purport that south Africa is a “fatherless nation” without considering the role dispossession and conquest may have played in the disruption and destruction of African social lives both at the level of the personal and of the family? All these questions are difficult to wrestle with since they carry the real and ugly experience of growing up without the father figure, the painful experience of having the streets as a classroom in which we learn to be men by men who long ago lost their path in life.

In this short reflection, I wish to critically reflect on this quagmire of growing up without a father in South Africa. In doing so, I wish to speak about my personal experience as window to societal contradictions as a black boy who grew up on the outskirts of a Cape Town township. Furthermore, I’m acutely aware of the limitation of speaking about experiences of an individual self in a world that constantly groups black people as collective. However, the experiences which I intend to write about are not necessarily unique to me and neither are they universal but are shared by many who belong to a group in South Africa which has been historically, socially, politically, and culturally discriminated against, as Biko once stated (Biko, 1996). The main argument which I intend to make is that for black people, because of the structural position in which they find themselves, it becomes difficult to carry out moral values of (shared) humanity, like caring, sheltering and loving those one holds dear in their heart. It is this difficulty to perform basic traits of care and kindness which I argue is at the center of the failure of so many black males to be present in the lives of their children.

When theorizing about fatherhood Mkhize (2006) argues in African Tradition and Social, Economic and Moral Dimensions of Fatherhood and Masculinity in South Africa, that we must see fatherhood as socio-moral practice that pays tribute to traditional values in African communities, like the belief that it takes a village to raise a child. In this sense of the saying, the cultural or social takes prominence, more than the biological, as the process of raising a child is a socio-culturally driven initiative (Mkhize, 2006: 132). Morrel (2005) expands on Mkhize’s argument, that parenthood and fathering are extended beyond the biological family to social roles that one plays in practices of care and responsibility. For Morrel as envisaged in his paper tentatively titled “Fathers, Fatherhood and Masculinity in South Africa” foregrounds fathering as something beyond the framework of biological parenting (see Dermot, 2008) and ‘breadwinner mentality,’ but more within the social contexts of a display of care and responsibility. Put differently, Morrel challenges us to think of the absence of some African fathers in the lives of their children as a consequence of economic issues  whose essence are structural.

Mkhize and Morrel both speak on the socio-economic condition as one of the constitutive elements which create the condition of possibility for the absence of fathers in the children’s lives. Though the argument is convincing, that the socio-economic disadvantages do negatively affect the ability of many African males to be fathers to their children, authors such Mkhize and Morrel, in their grounding of socio-economic issues, disavow the role of conquest, land dispossession and general settler colonialism in South Africa, as central themes which contribute massively to the dysfunctionality in African families. Even when in other cases those socio-economic issues are discussed, settler colonialism as the fundamental contradiction barely features as more than a footnote in the main thesis of the argument.

The centrality of settler colonialism must not be looked at through a reading of conquest and dispossession merely as historical ‘events,’, but settler colonialism should rather be seen as a structure which shapes institutions and whose logic is embedded in all social relations in South Africa. To see this played out, one needs to consider the television show Khumbul’ Ekhaya which rocked our screens back in 2006.

The show, though sincere in its approach to assisting people in finding their loved ones who disappeared from their lives, there are two striking observations to be made when watching the stories aired on the show. Firstly, that it was mostly black people who were looking for their loved one; and secondly, it was mostly black men found missing in action. This alarming number of black men who disappear from their families, though insidious to some viewers, shared the experiences of migrant workers who had to leave their homes and work in distant places, earning an income so they are in position to feed or look after their families back home. And because of having had to work, under extreme conditions, and still barely having enough, most eventually lost their financial muscle to fulfil that basic task. This is the point that I’m trying to drive home: the loss of land, the conquest of African people, led African people to being forced to sell their labour power to put food on the table, as a means of living up to their responsibility as sons, husbands, and fathers, and, indeed, as men in their rural communities back home.

It was also Stompie Mavi, a well-known musician from the Eastern Cape, who, through his creative ways, brought to the country’s imaginary the role of migrant labour in the destruction of the African family. Mavi’s song UTeba laments the role of the mining company called TEBA ltd that was responsible for recruiting men to become mineworkers in the city. Here, Mavi reconnects with how migrant labour contributed to the dysfunctionality of African families. This can be read as natal alienation, as family ties are broken up. It is then through the violence of conquest and dispossession that Africans are made to become vulnerable to exploitation, humiliation, and general loss, whether as adults or children. The link between labour migration and dysfunctional black families is evident to see in the number of households in South Africa which are currently headed either by single parents or older children who must look after their siblings. This reality was not born out of wishful thinking but is a consequence of both institutional practices grounded on the structure of settler colonialism in South Africa.

It is thus within that context that I never got to know my father. Just like those people on Khumbul’ Ekhaya. The structural setup, through settler colonialism, deprived me of an opportunity (read possibility) of having a father. This is because the likelihood of growing up in a stable family for black people in South Africa is so slim that the nation has been declared, indeed, as in liberal circles, a fatherless nation. But be that as it may, I grew up knowing who my father was and later learned about his history. Lion Makhunzi lived from March 1962 until 6 July 2020. The man, unlike the typical narrative of the drunken father, was sober from the cradle to the grave. (And I suspect that sobriety may have made him miss out on the spoils of life.) Common to other black folks in South Africa, my father was asecurity guard for over 20 years for a security company, ADT. A job that is commonly reserved for black folks, to protect other’s people businesses and property, while their own children sneak out at night to have some beer at the local pubs, experimenting with drugs or with prostitution.

My father would later become the character I got to sing about in struggle songs, during Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall student unrests across the country from 2015. “My mother was kitchen girl, and my father was a guarding boy and that why I’m socialist”. And as Fallists* at the time, we were acutely aware that the structural conditions of black people have not changed, that’s why a song which was popular during the struggle against apartheid could still find resonance even in this “new” dispensation. Thus, we sang the song with a bit of insight that our mothers were not merely kitchen girls and our fathers guarding boys, but were fungible or mutually interchangeable, as anyone’s parent or any adult could have been a boy or a girl, so long as they were black. Again, this shared reality of fungibility brought out natal alienation, as in other cases, where parents worked with their children, their relations were not recognised as such, as sons and their fathers were ‘boys,’ daughters and their mothers were ‘girls’ to their bosses and their children.

I cried when my father passed on. Not because of some deep love I had for him, but I was amazed at how much I could feel for someone who was barely around when I was in my childhood. When I needed a father to teach me how to be a man in society and having to live with that loss of a wish that never became, my father was being dehumanised and emasculated by the world, sacrificing his time; putting his life on the line; protecting white people’s private property; while his own children, nephews and nieces chased pavements which led them nowhere in the township.

My father and I have not been close. I was angry about his absence in my ‘life.’ Growing up without a father in the township was hard. To look for inspiration from another man in the township, men who have long given up on their lives and have succumbed to violence and humiliation, it was difficult. I felt so much for my father, a black man who was refused roles as a father, and a husband, and failed to show us love and care. He failed not because he was inadequate to love and be there, but precisely because the world is structured in a way that makes it impossible for black people to even do the basic labour of love and care for their loved ones. And this, for me, the crux of the matter: a love that is underpinned by the conditions of impossibility.

Through my journey, I had to learn and understand the impossibility of black life, under extreme and unliveable conditions. My father, like all black people, wrestled with the impossibility of black life. For that, I forgive the elder for not being there. What else could I do if not seeing it for what it is: natal alienation and blackness as a lived impossibility make it hard for black people to hold and maintain strong family ties.

Therefore, black life makes life impossible for blacks to participate in adventures where they could be recognisable as human beings; raise their children in harmony and peace. Therefore, until we can fully comprehend the ongoing structural conditions of settler colonialism and antiblackness, we will never understand the reasons for black families being broken up.

References

Biko, 1996,. Write what I like

Bray, R., Gooskens, I. Moses, S., Kahn, L. and Seekings, J. (2010) Growing Up in the New South Africa: Childhood and adolescence in post-apartheid Cape Town. Pretoria: HSRC Press.

Mkhize, N. (2006). African traditions and the social, economic and moral dimensions of fatherhood. Baba: men and fatherhood in South Africa, 183-198.

Morell, R. (2006) Chapter 2: ‘Fathers, Fatherhood and Masculinity in South Africa’, in Ritcher, L. and Morrel, R. (Eds) BABA: Men and Fatherhood in South Africa. Pretoria: HSRC Press.

Dermot, E. (2008) chapter 1 ‘paradoxes of contemporary fatherhood’, in Intimate Fatherhood. London: Routledge.

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