A father dies. A father is born

The death of his father at 55 provoked a confusing emotional reaction in Tumiso Mashaba, the author of this moving, gritty portrait of a relationship between a father and his son

Tumiso Mashaba’s father, Neo “Snowy” Mashaba, was a distant and often brutal presence in his childhood. Why, then, this grief at his father’s passing? What does his reaction mean, now, as a father to his own children?

Covering themes of black masculinity, generational trauma, toxic masculinity, infidelity, abuse, suicide and mental health, Mashaba creates a gritty backdrop of modern South Africa. Here is an edited excerpt from A Father is Born.

***

I went through the remainder of my second year at varsity with a sense of restlessness, a feeling of winding down. I was doing a fouryear degree, two years full time and the other two part time, with a dissertation submission at the end. My two full-time years were coming to an end and I no longer felt like being at varsity or at res.

By the end of the year I had no real home to go back to. My mother had moved out. It was just me, my father and my baby brother Tumelo. My mother would come by to check up on us. She was moving from place to place, trying to sort out her life.

I spent the better part of those holidays out partying with friends and coming back home only to sleep at night. There was nothing that my father could say or do to me. He had forsaken his moral high ground by having an extramarital affair. That December we all celebrated Christmas and New Year’s Eve at different places and with different people. Broken up.

***

Even though my father was bitter, he was still hopeful that my mother would come back one day.

“Your mother is mad, that one. She needs to really stop this behaviour of hers,” he would tell me in passing. In his mind, she was going through some silly midlife crisis and she needed to snap out of it. It was only in May of the new year, when my mother bought herself a big, three-bedroomed, facebrick house in Etwatwa, Daveyton, that my father realised she was never coming back.

I had never seen or heard my father cry, not even when Tshepo passed away. But one night, after we had all gone to bed, I heard him cry out, painfully and desperately, from his room. I could hear him try to suppress the cry but the emotion he was feeling must have been just too intense for him to stop.

I think that night was his breaking point. It was very uncomfortable to hear such an outpouring of grief from my father. It showed me that he was human after all. I felt sorry for him. I wished that I could reach out to him. But there was nothing I could do.

His moment of vulnerability felt important, as if he were coming to terms with all that he had kept shrouded up inside of him all these years. I could not take that away from him, as painful as it was to hear a grown man bawling.

I also could not undo the past. I could not go back in time and tell my mother to give her marriage a second try. My blessing on her decision to forge a new life without my father could not be undone. In the morning, we just went about our lives as usual.

***

The one thing that my father was not prepared to compromise on was Tumelo. He told my mother that there was no way she was going to get full custody of him. He told her that her life was unstable and she was not going to unsettle Tumelo’s life as well.

I had now moved out of home and was trying to make it in the media industry in the busy streets of Johannesburg. So I was the least of my father’s concerns. Tumelo was the only person he had left, and he was determined to hold on to him no matter what.

My mother did try to get full custody, but my father was adamant that it was not going to happen. He was quite threatening. He did not say in so many words what he might do if my mother continued to try to gain full custody. But one could deduce from his language and tone that he meant business, and that he was prepared to do anything to stop Tumelo being taken away from him.

My father’s attitude towards my mother evolved into sheer hatred. He stopped referring to her as “your mother” and started calling her “that one”.

At the time, my father had a 9mm-calibre firearm and my mother feared that if he were to be pushed to the limits, he might be tempted to use it, and so she relented and agreed to see Tumelo only on weekends.

But bitter and angry as he was, my father used this period to get right as a parent with my little brother Tumelo what he got wrong with me and Tshepo.

My father’s life now revolved only around his work as the principal of Sechaba Primary School and around Tumelo’s needs and wellbeing.

And he never raised a hand against him. Not even once. He nurtured him with nothing but positivity. He cooked for him every day. He helped him with his schoolwork. He framed all his merit and achievement certificates and he proudly hung them up on the walls around the new house.

I started warming to him. He was no longer the same father that had raised me and Tshepo. He was maturing into a better father. Everyone deserves a second chance, I thought.

A Father is Born is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers (R270).