Kgosi Sibeko

Last night, my son came home late. His T-shirt was soaked in blood, but he moved without injury, his steps steady, his breath calm. I didn’t ask. Maybe I should have. Maybe it was my duty as his father. But I have lived too long in this township to believe that asking always leads to the truth.

We have been here for as long as I can remember, in a house that was never quite finished. The roof still leaks in the heavy rains, and the front steps crumble a little more each year. There was never much money, but there was always hunger, always danger, always the knowledge that we walked a fine line between making it to the next day and becoming a name whispered in the streets. This is life in Cape Town, South Africa—our city of beauty and blood.

I am sixty-three now, and I have done things that weigh on me at night. A man learns early in this life that peace is not always an option. Sometimes survival demands things that cannot be undone, choices that echo for decades. I tell myself that I did what I had to do, that my hands were only weapons against a world that never gave me a choice. And yet, when I see my son’s face in the dim light of our home, I wonder if he tells himself the same things.

From the outside, we are already condemned. The white world looks at us with judgment, with fear, with the certainty that we are dangerous. They do not understand that danger is not a choice. They have never had to measure their steps between streetlights, never had to watch their backs while counting their last coins for food. I have often wished that I could trade places with them, even just for a day, just to see how it feels to move through the world without carrying this weight.

But violence—it is not something I can justify when I see it up close. Not when it is written on the fabric of my son’s shirt. I fear what he has done. And yet, I fear even more that if I question him, if I push, I will be forced to confront my own reflection in his actions.

This is the question I do not dare to answer. So I say nothing. And I hope, somehow, that silence will keep him safe.