Chapter 7 — Fathers, Sons, and the Broken Covenant

Manuscript Draft v0.1 · Part I — Where This Started · Bronze · 2 September 2026

The father I had

My father was a Sergeant Major in the Army before he was anything else I knew him as. That formation never fully left him. He carried a toughness that had clearly been built somewhere on purpose — the kind that doesn't happen by accident, the kind institutions specifically train into people because the institution needs it from them. Around Bloemfontein, among the people who knew him through his work as an assessor, he had a reputation to match it: die hardegat — the hard-headed one, the one who didn't bend easily.

That's who I knew as a child, and that's most of what I had to go on for a long time: a man built for endurance, not for the kind of softness a boy sometimes needs from a father and doesn't have the words to ask for directly. His marriage to my mother ended when I was in Standard 3, in 1993 — I've already told you that part of the timeline, and I'm not going to retell the divorce itself here. What I want to name in this chapter is something narrower: what it felt like to be his son, specifically, inside a household that was carrying its own private, ordinary, unspectacular fracture at the exact same time everything else in the country was shifting too.

I don't remember him explaining much of what was happening, in either direction — not the divorce, not what came after it, not the remarriage a year and a half later. I don't say that as an accusation. I say it because it's true, and because the not-explaining is itself the actual subject of this chapter, more than any single incident I could point to.

The world that formed him

I did not grow up in the world that made my father who he was, and it took me most of my adult life to understand how much that matters. He came up through a version of South African manhood built almost entirely around endurance, discipline, and the specific silence the military trains into men as a survival skill rather than a personal failing. Feelings, in that formation, were mostly treated as liabilities — things to be managed, not spoken, certainly not modeled openly for a watching son.

I'm not writing that to excuse anything. I'm writing it because understanding where a hardness comes from is different from pretending the hardness didn't cost anything. Both things can be true in the same sentence: my father was shaped by a world that never taught him how to hand emotional language down to his children, and that absence still cost me something real, regardless of how understandable its origin was.

What reached the son

What reached me, most days, was competence without much explanation. He was not computer literate — not a small detail, given what this family business eventually needed, and given that it's a large part of why I ended up joining it myself in 2006, at his and my grandfather's side, filling a gap neither of them could fill alone. That's not a complaint. It's simply the shape of the inheritance: a son stepping into a role partly because the world had changed faster than his father and grandfather could keep pace with it — the exact pattern this whole book keeps returning to, here showing up inside my own family, a full generation before I ever thought to name it as a pattern at all.

What I learned too late

He died on the 8th of March, 2023. It moved fast, in the end — a complaint about his back, a doctor's visit, muscle relaxants, hospitalisation within days, and then it was over in a matter of weeks. I did not have the luxury of a long goodbye in which everything unspoken between us finally got spoken. Very few people do. What I had instead was the ordinary, unfinished mess that most real relationships between fathers and sons actually end in — some things said, most things not, and a grief that arrived tangled up with responsibilities I had no space to set down long enough to properly feel it.

What I understood only afterward, and understand more clearly now that I'm a father myself, is that a lot of what looked like indifference was very likely a man doing the only thing his own formation had ever taught him to do under pressure: endure, keep functioning, keep the business moving, and trust that love didn't need to be spoken as long as it was being demonstrated through continued presence and continued work. I don't think that reading excuses the cost to me. I think it's simply the more complete truth, and a more complete truth is what this whole book has promised, from its very first pages, to try to tell.

The covenant question

What was a father meant to hand down, in the fullest sense of the word? Not only provision — he gave real provision, and I don't want that erased by anything else in this chapter. Something more: language for feeling, permission to be uncertain out loud, a model for how a grown man asks for help rather than simply enduring alone until enduring runs out.

What was handed down instead was competence, endurance, and a silence around anything softer than either of those — a silence I now recognise as its own kind of inheritance, passed to him before it was ever passed to me.

What I must not pass on unchanged, to my own children, is exactly that silence. Not the toughness — some of that toughness has served me honestly, and I don't intend to pretend otherwise. The silence around what the toughness was protecting.

The father I choose to become

I am trying, and I want to be honest that trying is the accurate word, not succeeding — to become a father who explains rather than simply expects, who apologises plainly when he's wrong rather than letting silence stand in for an apology, who can say I don't know how to do this either out loud in front of his children rather than performing a certainty he doesn't actually have.

There's a fuller telling of what that surrender has actually looked like for me — spiritually, specifically — that belongs somewhere in this book, and I've written some of it already, separately, raw and unfinished, waiting for the right place to be folded in properly. This chapter isn't that telling. This chapter is simply the ground that surrender had to be built on top of: a father I loved, who loved me back in the only language his own formation had given him, and a covenant broken in exactly the ordinary, survivable way most covenants between fathers and sons actually break — not through cruelty, but through an inheritance neither of us chose and neither of us knew, at the time, how to name.

My children will have words for what I never had words for.

That's the whole covenant, restated, one generation forward.