A letter to my father

Conversations with Elders: Episode 1 (Ft Mmatshilo Motsei)

April 15, 2020

Gender Conditioning and Consent Part 2

August 10, 2021

July 20, 2021

Dad,

There is a song by the now-defunct band, 8 Bars Short, called Khombela. Released in 2013, the guitar driven number sees Itai Hakim and Pelonomi Moiloa sing about their yearning for home and a desire to map out their ancestry.

“Hi to ti akela, ndlela ya hina. Hi lava ku tivha leswi nga hindza. Mara vokokwana vha fambili, navatswari avaswi tivi,” sings Itai. Loosely translated this means, “We will build our own way. We want to know what came before us but our grandparents are gone and our parents do not know.”The song concludes with the pair asking, begging almost, to know where (in the ancestral sense) they come from.

Sometime in 2017, I listened to this song and it reminded me of us, in so many ways. Home, and its associations have always been complicated for me. I am Venda only by the mere fact that you are, but my tongue cannot wrap itself around the language. Whenever the topic comes up, I tell people I’m Venda, without anything except that particular stated noun as proof.I can hardly speak a word of the language, and last year was the first time in my adult life I’d set foot in Tshaulu, the village where you grew up. I suppose it was bound to be that way.

Some thirty years ago, you left your small village to plant yourself in Johannesburg. You wanted to be a doctor. You were smart enough to be a doctor but because the axis upon which the world spins is money and not desire, you could not afford to be a doctor. To speak of your journey to Johannesburg, then, is to speak of loss.You became a policeman because, as you’ve always recounted the story, God whispered to you one wintry night that He wanted you to be a policeman.You’ve always maintained that, to be a policeman is to be in service of something greater than yourself. “Jesus is a fire,” you used to tell me. “Every day, I leave that door with the fear that I could not come back.

But every day, I make it back. Jesus is a fire. He surrounds me everywhere I go.”Perhaps, but unlikely.You will forgive me if I’m speaking out of turn, Dad, but I don’t think I’ve ever believed any of that to be true, even when I’ve nodded in agreement. Because here is what we know about God and fire. God, at least the one you worship has no qualms inflicting pain or humiliation on the people he supposedly loves. The Bible is replete with such examples; Job who – by God’s admission was “blameless and upright” had his fortune stripped off him and his health and offspring stolen in a conspiracy by both God and Satan. The God who crucified his own son and, supposedly, assigns disasters and sickness on a whim.

This God is the same one who has kept you alive during your 33 years as a policeman?I refuse to believe it.If God is a fire, He is the kind that singes everything within His radius. If I had any use for myth or religion, I would suggest that something else has kept you alive: a more benevolent god or omnipotent spirit. But, because I have no use for myth, everything points in one direction: youDespite the pressures of your job, you have been (and still are) a great father. I’d often ask myself what it takes to spend the entire day chasing dead bodies, then coming back home at night to be a fully functioning parent. I don’t know how you and Mom did it, but you did. So, everything I’ve learnt about fatherhood and what it means to be a man has been modelled after you. Very early on in our lives, you taught me and my siblings that nothing is ever more important than family: that bond is stronger than any force we can comprehend. You will remember my own disappointment when my own family splintered at the beginning of 2021. I don’t remember how I broke the news to you; only that you listened intently when I told you that I was no longer with the mother of my child and that I was going to be a single father. At that point I didn’t know what that meant other than the fact that I would need to move back home with my son and make more money to take care of him. I was deflated.Single parenthood has always been the sum of my worst fears. Late at night, when my son lay asleep beside me, I would be assaulted by a ferris wheel of questions: why couldn’t I have made things work with the mother of my child? How will single parenthood affect my son? Will my son grow up thinking that nothing lasts forever; that people move in and out of his life as they please?

It’s a set of questions I’ve yet to find the answers to. What I remember most, though, is how, in the wake of my new-found status as single father, you called me a man for the first time in the 30 years I’ve been alive. “Part of being a man is shouldering responsibility,” you told me. “Things happen. This has happened. Your son needs you to be a man for his sake.”I heard the message for what it was. It wasn’t a charge to suck it all up and walk the pain off. Instead, you were warning me against the one thing so many men do when confronted with trouble: run. I had two choices. The first was to recoil into a self-pitying mess and drink the pain away (as I’d often done in the past). The second was to accept the circumstances for what they are and walk uphill. I chose the latter. And everyday, I’m glad I did. My son loves me more than I can ever imagine. I falter quite a bit. I’m impatient, I’m a workaholic and I’m anxious but there’s never any doubt in my son’s mind that I love him and that he loves me back.On most days, that’s enough to keep me going. Thank you for helping me make the healthiest choice possible. Love,
Rofhiwa

Conversations with Elders: Episode 1 (Ft Mmatshilo Motsei)

Gender Conditioning and Consent Part 2

Afrika Ikalafe Shrine