What’s Papa got to do with my rage?

The glass shattered first. Then hands yanked the door open. Then fists. Then the sharp, final punctuation of gunshots. I remember the taste of dust and blood, the strange calm that sometimes arrives when the body narrows the world to a single task: survive.

I did not grow up imagining that one day I would be dragged out of my car, beaten, and shot by young men who looked like they could have been my brothers.

Yet that is exactly what happened.

Years ago, after returning from a speaking engagement, I was hijacked on a Johannesburg road. I survived by a hair’s breadth and woke up in hospital with a defibrillator on my chest and a question that would not let me go.

Not only how.

Why.

What kind of country produces this kind of rage?

South Africa’s violence is not episodic – it is a climate. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s Global Study on Homicide consistently places South Africa among the countries with the highest homicide rates in the world. Local data tells the same story. South African Police Service crime statistics and Statistics South Africa’s Victims of Crime Survey show that men are overwhelmingly both the perpetrators and the victims of violent crime.

Those numbers explain scale. They do not explain shape.

What struck me that night was not only the brutality, but the emotional poverty behind it. The rage I encountered did not feel strategic. It felt brittle, thin-skinned, explosive – less like calculation and more like a life finally collapsing under pressure.

One detail would not leave me alone: how young they looked.

Young enough to have been my classmates.

Young enough to have been my cousins.

Young enough to still be someone’s sons.

And that raised a question no police docket can answer: Where were the fathers?

Violence is rarely random

Violence often looks impulsive. It rarely is.

More often, it is the final eruption of something that has been forming quietly for years – unprocessed humiliation, fear, anger, and grief. It arrives suddenly only because no one has been watching what has been building underneath.

Criminology and developmental psychology are careful here. Father absence does not cause violence on its own. Poverty, inequality, substance abuse, gang economies, weak policing, spatial apartheid, and trauma all matter.

But father absence removes something earlier and more intimate: one of the first buffers against violence – a daily presence where anger is noticed, slowed down, named, and shaped before it hardens.

A widely cited meta-analysis on parenting and delinquency by Hoeve et al. found consistent associations between weakened parental attachment, poor supervision, and later delinquency, while explicitly warning against simplistic causal claims.

Correlation is not destiny. But it is not irrelevant either.

A crisis of father absence

In South Africa, this pattern is not marginal – it is close to normal.

According to Statistics South Africa’s General Household Survey (2023), only 31.5% of children live with both biological parents. Nearly half live with their mother only, while a very small minority live with their father only.

You can read those numbers as data.

Or you can picture them as empty chairs at kitchen tables. School meetings attended alone. Boys growing up without a man who knows how they take their tea, or what makes their shoulders tense.

When absence becomes ordinary, its consequences become harder to name – until something breaks.

Growing up without someone to catch your anger

Children are not born knowing what to do with anger. They learn it in bodies before they learn it in words.

A boy learns restraint the first time a man plays hard but stops in time – when strength meets a boundary and does not cross it. He learns, in his body, that power can be real without being reckless.

He learns limits when someone corrects him without crushing him – when wrongdoing is named clearly, but dignity is not stripped away.

And he learns safety when someone stays present while his emotions surge, when anger flares and tears threaten, and a steady voice says, without panic or drama: I’m here. Breathe.

When that presence is missing, anger has no apprenticeship.

Years after my hijacking, sitting in therapy for post-traumatic stress, my psychologist said something that sliced through my self-image:

“You are very intelligent, but emotionally illiterate.”

I grew up without a father in the home, and strength was defined as silence, endurance, survival. I’m fine became my default answer – even when my body knew otherwise.

That emotional illiteracy is not unusual here. It often passes for masculinity.

A prison taught me what statistics never could

In 2019, I was invited to speak at Leeuwkop Prison.

I asked a room of more than a hundred men serving time for violent crimes – assault, robbery, murder – packed shoulder to shoulder into a fluorescent-lit hall:

“Has anyone here ever been told ‘I love you’ by their father?” 

No hands went up.

Then: “How many of you were raised by your father?”

Two.

It was not a scientific sample. Just one room – more than a hundred men, reduced in that moment to a single, sobering pattern.

The violence we fear does not begin in prison.

It begins much earlier.

Rage is often grief with nowhere to go

In South Africa, father absence is not only personal – it is historical. The migrant labour system systematically pulled men away from families for extended periods, creating patterns of absence that outlived apartheid.

Add poverty. Add shame. Add the belief that if you cannot provide, you do not deserve to be seen.

What remains is a generation of young men who feel unseen, unprotected, and unclaimed.

Rage often carries another name:

Grief.

Presence is protection

Violence prevention is not only policing. It is formation.

The World Health Organization’s violence-prevention research consistently identifies early caregiving relationships and stable adult presence as key protective factors against later violent behaviour.A father does not have to be perfect to interrupt this pattern.

He only has to be there.

Where biological fathers are absent, other men matter – uncles, coaches, teachers, mentors – men who know a boy’s name and notice when his posture changes.

An invitation, not an accusation

Many fathers leave not because they do not care, but because they feel disqualified. When fatherhood is defined only by provision, men who cannot provide often disappear.

But a child does not need perfection.

He needs someone who returns.

The night I was hijacked could have ended differently. It did not. But it left me with a conviction that refuses to leave me alone:

Long before the gunshots, there were smaller disappearances – doors not opened, calls not returned, apologies never spoken.

Violence has a soundtrack.

Sometimes it begins with silence.

Peace does not begin with sirens, cells, or courts.

It begins much earlier – in rooms where a man chooses not to disappear.

This article was commissioned by Heartlines Fathers Matter and has appeared on sites such as the Daily Maverick.