The picture that emerged from my Alexandra-based group of young men was that a clear majority lived with little or no direct contact with their fathers. A few lived with older male figures in their homes such as grandparents, brothers and uncles – men who could be regarded as ‘social fathers’ – but most had, at best, intermittent contact with their biological fathers. Of the 32 participants I started off with in this study, 19 had no contact with their fathers or did not know the identity of their fathers; 7 knew their fathers but they had separated from their mothers; 4 were living with their fathers but described them as emotionally absent; and 2 had lost their fathers through death.

This small sample from one South African township has resonance with a report in 2018 on the state of fatherhood in the country as a whole, which revealed that a majority of children grow up without father figures in their lives. The report is comprehensive and discusses various causes and dynamics of father absence in South Africa and its associated consequences.

Primary themes from the interviews and focus group discussions I had with the young men included: dealing with the absence of a father figure; fantasies around meeting the absent father; the agency of mothers in dealing with the absent father; and ideals around future fathering. In this chapter, ‘father absence’ refers to fathers who are absent through death, absent with occasional contact, absent with regular contact and absent with no contact at all.

It is important here, again, to take the context of Alexandra township into account when discussing the participants’ narratives. The majority of families in Alex live in shacks, many of which are not big enough to accommodate all members of the household. As a result, many families are dispersed and family members do not necessarily live under the same roof. For example, some of the boys told me that they did not live in the same shack with their brothers, who instead were renting their own backyard shacks, and they seldom saw them. Uncles or grandparents were either around in other parts of Alex or back at home in the rural areas or other townships in South Africa. It was rare in the whole sample to find participants living with other male figures such as uncles or grandparents in this township context.