Addressing systemic abandonment: How love and community can transform South Africa's boys in dust

Daily Maverick

4 days ago

'In South Africa, in the urban area, in location and township, at the corners of every street he is the youth of that place. He is not the exception, but the rule… The tsotsi is a symbol of a rotten social order, of a society which does not care.' — Naught for Your Comfort, Bishop Trevor Huddleston CR, 1956.
Dear Themba,
Thank you for your stirring and necessary piece Ruffling feathers — why the GBV narrative needs to include the boy in the dust. I read it slowly, twice.
Each word landed with a familiar ache and hope, ngacabanga kithi, home. I grew up in two small towns, Estcourt/Emtshezi for my childhood and Grahamstown/Makhanda for my higher education. Questions stirred within me as a black South African Zulu Christian man having worked in the elite branches of boys' education.
Last year, I returned home for an extended stay in Wembezi township. I allowed myself to slow down and be still — not just visit, but locate myself in the rhythms and routines of everyday township life. To walk to the shops. To greet neighbours. Attend a funeral on a Wednesday morning, take my mother to Thursday manyano.
There, on the dusty pavements and street corners, I saw our brothers — amaPhara. Generally in pairs and alone. So many lose identities and the names they once had: 'So and so is now iPhara '. Kodwa they have names, Sizwe, Celani, Khanya, Nhlakanipho, almost always dishevelled, often high.
Many seem to have abandoned bathing altogether. Schooling is a distant memory. All of them, it seems, are addicted to nyaope or wonga. Spoken of as threats, as burdens the term Phara is derived from parasite, as failures, this language we use among ourselves rather than as young brothers, siblings, children of ours — rarely as boys in the dust.
I began to notice micro-networks and value systems — some who do piece jobs for local gogos and mamas: grass cutting, fetching water, fixing things around the house. Their compensation — coins, food, enough for the next hit of nyaope.
Others steal: it can range from petty theft to serious items that can be sold relatively quickly. Clothes from washing lines, kettles from neighbours, devices often from their own homes. Opportunity.
Some break into homes, carry weapons, attack people and steal. Then there are the early risers who migrate daily to economic hubs — the CBD, taxi ranks, shops — where the same streams repeat: small jobs, petty crime, or more hardened acts of survival.
Subjected to oppression
Bafo, I agree with you, we cannot solve gender-based violence (GBV) until we critically evaluate and reorder the conditions in which South African men are being socialised. Ta Nehisi Coates asks what happens to people who are subjected to oppression, disinheritance? What becomes of us when exposed to hostile conditions.
In his book, Why Men Hurt Women and Other Reflections on Love, Violence and Masculinity, Professor Kopano Ratele speaks of a deficiency of love in our lives, a type of violence that is baked into our very nature as a society: 'The state of homelessness in a country… poor sanitation infrastructure or maintenance, inadequate educational facilities… and inadequate and unsafe public transport are other instances of this picture of violence.'
Ratele connects the dots between the structural order of the world and how it creates the conditions for disconnection and 'lovelessness', a father-hunger in children from a young age. Boys have this father-hunger uniquely, it is connected to modalities of self, examples of what they can become.
The phenomenon of ubuTsotsi emerges with the creation of townships — contained, landless, educationally sparse and economically limited. Ubuntu, as a knowledge system, addresses Maslow's hierarchy of needs if practised. But even Ubuntu requires access to land, water, rivers. Where access to nature is denied, Ubuntu is hard to live. We face a crisis of Ubuntu's practicability.
Drug syndicates now embed themselves using spaza shops — run by both foreign and local cartels — to peddle drugs to children. The rot is organised. It is deep. Add family dysfunction to this recipe, inkinga. Yet, not all unemployed young men in townships are amaPhara, but all suffer forms of systemic abandonment.
I have asked myself whether it is possible for someone to be addicted to violence, to beating up women, a most vile way of numbing their inner trauma, grasping at some self-assurance through dominance.
Professor Bruce Alexander's work on addiction challenges the common notion that addiction is about only the substance itself. In his Rat Park experiments, when rats were placed in isolation with unlimited access to morphine water, they consumed it compulsively. Yet, in a stimulating, connected environment — Rat Park — they largely ignored the drug. His conclusion? Addiction is often a response to dislocation, to social isolation. It is not simply chemical. It is communal.
Emotionally inept
Dr Melusi Dlamini's research moved me deeply in this regard. In I Show Her My Feelings, he urges us to take seriously the emotional lives and love doings of young black men. Love doings. Challenging the notion that township boys are emotionally inept or predisposed to violence, showing instead how love acts as a transformative force.
One participant (Anathi, 19) said: 'Yesterday I was a young boy who got dirty, walking around with torn pants… when I started getting a girlfriend… I didn't want her to see me looking dirty… she basically made me aware of myself.'
It reminded me of what happens in elite boys' schools. Love shows up as investment: in futures, in their self-worth, in tutors, psychologists, chaplains, conditioning coaches. Those boys mostly thrive, not because they are inherently better, because they are 'born on the right side of the tracks'. That space is not without its own toxicities.
But resources allow boys to be seen and affirmed. Why should the boy in the dust be any different?
Melusi Dlamini's work also highlights ukushela — boys speaking from the heart, using poetry, vulnerability, or charm to express affection. Simba, 18yrs old: 'I shela [show my love] with poems… It must be something that comes from the heart.'
I've come to believe that what fuels ubuPhara culture is not just drug addiction, nor delinquency, but something far more sinister: systemic abandonment. These young men of Wembezi, Mitchells Plain, KwaMashu, Chatsworth exist, isolated and disinherited. Addicted not just to wonga or nyaope, but to the numbness it provides — an escape.
Mandisi Dyantisi's song Mabaphile rings in my mind. ' Sithi mabaphile ' Mandisi prays. Healing.
According to the State of South Africa's Fathers Report 2024, 35.6% of children live with their fathers. Alternatively, many men in our country are playing father figure roles to South African children. They are malome's, stepfathers, tanci, mkhulu, sekuru, ooms and oupas, present, loving, standing in the gap — 40.3% of children live with these men.
'It is when employment opportunities increase that men leave their families to provide. When employment is scarce, they are home — but unable to support,' says the report. These economic conditions create difficult realities — they can be present; broken and emasculated. Or absent with periodical remittance. Men can also be physically present but emotionally and spiritually absent. No absolutes.
Ngiyakuzwa, Themba mfwethu: language matters, we cannot raise whole men if all they hear are restrictions. We need a sense of what is possible, of who we expect them to be, wholesome, purposeful 'manhoods'.
Language of affirmation
The language of affirmation means nothing if our prophetic words aren't actively creating a world where they can live in a dignified way, with access to education, their emotions, opportunities for self-development, building a beautiful life. A language of love must be partnered with prophetic structural nation building.
As Professor N Mkhize reminds us in her conversation with Dr Ongama Mtimka, Policy must solve for gun-blazing men and 'nyaope boys', anywhere in human history are groups of men organising themselves, some rogue and trying to take control, others in power asserting their dominance. The capacity to organise, access resources, and have means and purpose is a key part of human history, especially in relation to men.
Professor Mkhize asserts that in a nuanced way we must understand that gendered responses to resource inequality have implications for a functioning society. Economic policy must speak to the lived experience of the nyaope boy.
The spaces men and boys gather in communion, Amadodana or men's guilds/ministries in churches, often clad in uniform and song, hold potential as sites of reconstruction. Increasingly, social ills like GBV and addiction are being discussed.
Religious tropes aside, beneath the hymns and scripture lies a longing — for connection, for guidance, for healing, brotherhood and fatherhood. In many of these gatherings, 'love talk' already exists in coded language: in testimonies, in prayer requests, in quiet admissions of struggle.
Sports are another critical space. What if we expanded and engaged these spaces for national benefit? The software is there already.
The inaugural Gentlemen's Winter Brunch exemplifies a growing movement to create healing spaces for men. Far from a typical social gathering, this event offered a sacred space for men to engage in deep, honest conversations about identity, trauma and masculinity. The event underscored the power of storytelling and community.
This is not the only space. There are many others looking at health, wellness, dialogues, including Father a Nation; Sonke Gender Justice; Brovember; Where is my masculinity; and Dope Black Dads to name a few.
Perhaps in the National Dialogue called by the president, we ought to look at the gathering spaces of men, as offering an opportune moment for truth telling, truth action, a Kairos. We need state machinery, a national service programme that is highly creative, robust, thoughtful and connected to the land.
Organise and execute
We must cast our nets wide, catch boys where they will read, run, work, build infrastructure, talk, meditate, sleep and deepen understanding of themselves — organise and execute. Beqathwe ukuze bakhuliswe, so that boys desire to be men, for personal, communal and national benefit. We need a regenerative programme of the soil and soul. Clean the rivers so they may cleanse us once more.
So let the mother hen fight, Themba. Let us remember the mother hen herself is vulnerable as she guards. Let us not forget the boy who must be loved systemically, told he is loved, shown that he is loved consistently and taught to do the same for others.
We've inherited this rottenness, but that need not be the end of the story, we have work to do. With all our dialogue, our commissions and manifestos, we have failed to dismantle apartheid meaningfully enough for the boy in the dust.
Who will teach him how to understand his body and when to use his fists? Who will teach him to breathe? To be a steward of his own soul and to be stewarded by his soul?
'Love is also something that is very important because it inspires you and it can also change you. [It can] make you a better person… and become a clean person even in your mind. You think positively and also be gentle with people.' (Menzi, 18).
Siyabonga. Thank you for calling us back to the village. Ekhaya.
Until then, I stand beside you — in the dust.
Sincerely,