Fatherhood in Urban South Africa: The Making of the “Poor, Black man” as the Absentee Father in South African Media

The last decade has witnessed a gradual shift in South Africa in the ways that men are talked about in policy and development discourses. Men and particular types of masculinity have become an important focus of interventions trying to address HIV, gender-based violence, and absentee fathers. This chapter examines the ways that reified notions of African masculinity are being constructed in post-Apartheid South Africa via multiple, intersecting sources. Analysing a series of newspaper articles published since 2011, we highlight discourses that form part of the one-dimensional representations of (poor, black) African masculinity as being in crisis, dangerous, violent, and disengaged from family life. Our findings reveal that there is a particular figure that has been produced in relation to this issue and problematised in such a way that legitimises the need for intervention. This is accomplished by relying on the portrayal of women and children as victims of male behaviour, and depicting men as victims of past and present economic conditions. The result is an increased scientific focus on this particular group of men and the normative agreement that interventions are needed to fix these men so they might affirm a specific ideal. This analysis illustrates the role played by NGOs, academics, and the media in “making up people,” in this case poor African urban men.