In Botswana, many children either grow up without father figures in their lives or abusive homes. Even though Mother’s Day holds the greatest significance in many people’s lives, this is not always the case with Father’s Day because many children grow up with absent fathers and if some have fathers, they get abusive ones who never devote a single second in their children’s lives.
Many children are birthed by single mothers resulting in many children growing up without knowing their fathers because some men are accustomed to denying their children paternity immediately when their partners tell them of their pregnancy.
However, growing up in an abusive home where your father turns your mother into a punching bag is the worst. Abuse affects the victims and children psychologically one way or the other.
“I grew up having a hardworking father. He and my mother dated when she was still a teenager and had four beautiful children.
Even though it seems like we had a perfect family since we did not lack anything, many nights were a nightmare, especially during the weekends. We would hear my mother crying only to wake up seeing our father punching her,” Tshoganetso Moilwa* said.
“My father never wanted our mum to be independent. Whenever she tried working he would make sure he goes to her workplace and harassed her and even threatened her employers so she never kept a job. She later started selling clothes so that she could also contribute to paying bills in the house but he always found a way to sabotage her. She depended so much on him,” Moilwa said.
She added that even though it was good having both parents despite the abuse, things turned south when her father decided to chase them out of the house he and her mother built. He chose another woman who was independent and her children over them. She pointed out that that became a breaking point for both them (children) and their mother. Things were never the same after the breakup.
Her mother who had no job experience or money to start a new job had to struggle to fend for herself and the children.
Moilwa said her mother constantly fell into depression and she and her siblings found it hard to adapt to their new lifestyle of poverty. Some days they would go to school dirty because they did not have detergent to wash their uniform. They also got familiar with going to school on empty stomachs.
Furthermore, she pointed out that she was still angry that she and her siblings had to go through all the suffering while their father was living comfortably with his new wife and stepchildren. She said he never bothered to build a relationship with them. Moilwa also said when he left their mother he left them too.
“Every Father’s Day brings bad memories to me. I remember someday a few years back, it was Father’s Day and I was not even aware of it because I never cared about the day since it is insignificant to me.
I was on public transport; the driver was playing the radio. The presenter was busy going on and on about fathers and even playing a song dedicated to fathers. It hit me hard that I did not have a dad and I had that void in my heart.”
“I needed a father in my life but I knew it was only a dream. I cried uncontrollably not caring about the stares people gave me. That man broke me. That man never loved us. How can a loving father abandon his children and not think twice about it? He never bothered checking up on us even though he knew our living conditions,” she said.
Moreover, according to Statistics Botswana 2019 report on births that occurred the same year, 83.8% of children were born to single mothers, 15.9% into marriage, 0.2 percent to divorced parents, and 0.1 percent to widowed parents. This indicates that more children in Botswana are fatherless.
*Name used in this article is not the real name of the interviewee.
