Why the Foundation Phase Needs Men Like Mr. Msomi, and What He’s Teaching Us About Fatherhood in South Africa
A reflection for Father’s Day, 21 June 2026
There is a sentence that follows men into Foundation Phase classrooms in South Africa, half curse and half compliment, said with raised eyebrows by colleagues and parents: “You are a male teacher, but you have a woman’s heart.” The researcher Vusi Msiza, who has spent the better part of a decade interviewing men like Mr. Sanele Msomi for the University of KwaZulu-Natal and now the University of South Africa, used that sentence as the title of one of his papers. He didn’t have to invent it. The men he interviewed had heard it said to them, again, in different words, by different people, in different staffrooms across the country.
I thought about that sentence when I sat down with Mr. Msomi, a Foundation Phase teacher in rural KwaZulu-Natal. He has seventy-three learners in his classroom. He marks for an hour after every day’s lessons. He teaches mathematics, English, life skills, and is about to add coding and robotics to that already crowded plate. He was raised by a single mother. He has no father figure of his own to remember. And he wakes up every Monday and walks into a classroom of seventy-three small children, most of whom, if they are black South Africans, if the statistics hold, are also growing up without their fathers at home.
This is a piece about him, and the men like him, and what it means that South Africa has so few of them.
The two numbers that should keep us up at night
Start with two numbers, sitting side by side.
The first: according to the State of South Africa’s Fathers 2024 report, released by Stellenbosch University, 64.5% of South African children do not live with their biological fathers. Among Black children, the figure is even starker. Only 31.7% live with their dads, compared with 80.2% of white children and 86.1% of Indian or Asian children. Roughly one in four South African children lives in a household with no adult male present at all. The Institute for Family Studies, surveying 43 countries, found that South Africa is the only one in which fewer than half of children live with both parents.
The second: roughly 78% of Foundation Phase teachers in South Africa are women. Foundation Phase, Grade R through Grade 3, is the stretch where a child learns to read, to count, to sit in a chair, to belong to a group, and to trust an adult who is not their parent. It is, neurologically and emotionally, the most formative ground a school will ever break. And it is overwhelmingly, almost exclusively, female.
These numbers did not arrive from nowhere. They are, in large part, the inheritance of a system designed to produce exactly this outcome. Debbie Budlender and Francie Lund, writing in Development and Change (2011), describe what the apartheid state engineered as nothing less than the deliberate destruction of family life — a system in which migrant labour contracts kept men away from their families for eleven months of the year, confined to mine compounds and urban hostels, legally prohibited from bringing wives and children with them. The whole apparatus sought to separate urban from rural, men from women, fathers from their families. A man could not raise his children and keep his employment. The two were, by design, mutually exclusive. The decline in fatherhood involvement that followed is not a cultural pathology. It is the long tail of colonial and apartheid injustice — evidenced today in the numbers of children growing up without their biological fathers and compounded by the high unemployment rates that continue to fall disproportionately on Black South Africans. Ratele and colleagues (2018) make the same point: it is not only biological fathers who can ‘be there’ for their sons, but the conditions under which biological fatherhood was made structurally impossible have left a gap that social fathers, mentors and communities are still working to fill. To look at today’s statistics and locate the problem in Black men or Black families — without first locating it in the system that shaped them — is to misread the inheritance entirely. And it is an inheritance that no longer stays within racial lines. The disruption of family life, high unemployment, and the erosion of intergenerational care structures now shape households across the country in ways that concern all of us, regardless of race or class.
Put those numbers together, and you start to see the shape of the problem. A generation of South African boys and girls are growing up with very little daily exposure to a man who is not angry, not absent, not drunk, not transactional, not a stranger. They go home to mothers and grandmothers. They come to school to women. Many of them will reach Grade 4 having spent more hours in front of a screen with a male character than they have spent with a real man who knew their name.
This isn’t an argument that women are doing it wrong. It is an argument that something is missing, and that the absence has consequences.
What the research keeps finding
The peer-reviewed literature on absent fathers in South Africa is grim and consistent. Kim and colleagues (2021), Salami and Okeke (2018), and others have linked biological father absence with poorer educational outcomes, higher rates of substance use, earlier sexual debut, and greater involvement in violence, for boys especially, but for girls too. The 2025 paper by researchers working on the Tsamaisano longitudinal study in South Africa interviewed adolescent boys aged 16 to 20 who had grown up without their fathers; a recurring theme was an unanswered question the young men carried with them about who they were supposed to become.
What is striking, though, is that the research does not say biological fathers or nothing. It says: children need consistent, present, accountable men in their lives. The concept that South African scholars like Kopano Ratele have developed, drawing on broader Africanist work, is social fathering: the recognition that uncles, grandfathers, coaches, pastors and, yes, teachers, can carry the weight of fatherhood for children whose biological fathers cannot or will not. The Heartlines and Father A Nation work in townships across South Africa is built on this premise. So is The Character Company, which has matched fatherless boys with vetted male mentors for over a decade.
A male Foundation Phase teacher, by this logic, is not just a teacher. He is, for many of his learners, the first reliable man they will know.
The stereotype Mr. Msomi must walk through
The trouble is that to become Mr. Msomi, a man must walk through a wall of suspicion first.
Msiza’s research, along with work by Bhana, Mashiya, Moosa, and Petersen, has documented what male Foundation Phase teachers in South Africa face. The participants in these studies describe being mocked by male colleagues for teaching “women’s work.” They describe parents who are nervous, suspicious, sometimes openly hostile when they discover that their five-year-old’s teacher is a man. They describe being passed over for Foundation Phase posts by School Governing Bodies who, regardless of policy, assume men cannot be trusted with small children. A 2021 study of SGBs explicitly found that the reluctance to hire male Foundation Phase teachers rests not on the South African Schools Act or on any employment policy, but on inherited social assumptions about gender, assumptions older than democracy itself.
The most painful of these assumptions is the one that hovers, unspoken, around every male teacher who works with young children: that he must be a predator, or a deviant, or “unnatural.” Petersen’s 2014 study used exactly those words, drawn from the men’s own accounts of what people whispered about them. Some of Msiza’s interviewees said they had been told outright that they would not be hired in the Foundation Phase because parents would not allow it.
I asked Mr. Msomi about this. He answered the question carefully, the way a man answers it who has thought about it before. He told me that when something happens in his classroom that he is not equipped to handle, a girl who keeps going to the toilet in a way that worries him, a situation that needs an adult woman’s presence, he immediately calls in one of his senior female colleagues. “There are some of the things that I’m able to share with the young girls,” he said. “I have to contact and talk to one of the seniors.”
This is not weakness. This is wisdom. It is what professional boundary-keeping looks like when you take the safety of children seriously. And it is precisely what the research recommends: not that men avoid the Foundation Phase, but that schools build genuine collaboration between male and female teachers so that children are held by both.
What Jordan Peterson got right (when he stuck to the psychology)
I want to bring in the work of the clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson here, narrowly and carefully, because his developmental and clinical writing (the parts that sit on top of decades of psychological research rather than on top of his cultural commentary) speaks directly to what Mr. Msomi is doing.
Peterson’s most enduring argument, drawn from his clinical practice and from the broader literature on meaning and self-determination, is that meaning emerges from responsibility, not the other way around. We do not find meaning and then take on a load; we take on a load, and meaning emerges from carrying it. This is not just a slogan. It echoes Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy, and the extensive psychological literature showing that adults who carry weight on behalf of others (children, communities, students) report higher life satisfaction and lower levels of depression than those who don’t, even when the carrying is genuinely hard.
Peterson has also been blunt about something the developmental psychology literature confirms: the absence of fathers is one of the most well-documented risk factors in the field. Paul Raeburn’s Do Fathers Matter? which surveys the empirical research, makes the same case more soberly. Children with involved fathers (or involved father figures) show better emotional regulation, stronger executive function, lower rates of behavioural problems, and better outcomes in adolescence. The 2024 longitudinal study by Italian researchers using the Parent-Child Relationship Scale confirmed what earlier work had only suggested: father involvement has a complementary developmental effect, not a redundant one. Fathers and mothers do not do the same thing for children, and children need both.
And here is the line worth keeping Peterson argues that the boys he saw clinically who were drifting, isolated, and angry were not boys who lacked freedom. They were boys who lacked something heavy enough to carry. Show me a boy who has been entrusted with a real responsibility by a real man, the argument goes, and I’ll show you a boy who is less likely to drift.
Mr. Msomi is that man, for seventy-three children at a time.
What men give to girls, too
There is a temptation in the conversation about male teachers to talk only about what they offer boys. The boys need a role model, the boys need someone to look up to, the boys need a man to show them how to be a man. All true. But the research, and Mr. Msomi himself, pushes us to think more carefully about what a male Foundation Phase teacher does for girls.
A 2023 study by Liu, published in Education Research International, surveys the literature on this question and concludes that early exposure to counter-stereotypical role models (male caregivers, female scientists) measurably reduces gender stereotyping in young children and broadens the range of futures they can imagine for themselves. Croft and colleagues’ work on Health, Early Education, and Domestic (HEED) fields shows the same: girls who see men in caring roles grow up with a different, fuller picture of what men are, and what relationships with men can look like.
Mr. Msomi said something quietly profound about this. Some of his female learners, he said, want to be like him when they grow up. Not because he is a man, but because of how he carries himself, how he treats them, what he expects of them. He is teaching the girls in his classroom that men can be calm, can be present, can be safe, and can be teachers. For a girl who may not have a father at home and who has otherwise mostly encountered men who frighten or disappoint her, that is not a small lesson. It might be the most important lesson she learns that year.
The honest caveats
It would be naive to write a piece like this without flagging two things that the critical literature is right to insist on.
The first comes from Msiza and Msibi’s 2024 paper in Educational Review, where they argue that some male Foundation Phase teachers, even while doing genuinely caring work, continue to enjoy and quietly claim male privilege within their schools, taking on leadership roles disproportionately, expecting deference, sometimes undermining their women colleagues. Caring masculinity, the concept theorised by Karla Elliott in her 2016 Men and Masculinities paper, is not automatic. It is not the case that a man who teaches young children has, by that fact alone, opted out of patriarchy. The work of unlearning a socially assumed position of authority is its own work, and it has to be done explicitly. Men in this profession must be invited, and required, to do it.
The second is that the answer to South Africa’s fatherlessness crisis is not, primarily, more male teachers. The answer is (social) fathers who stay. It is policies that support parental leave, employment that allows men to be present, communities that hold men accountable. A male teacher in a Foundation Phase classroom is not a substitute for a father, and no serious researcher would argue otherwise. He is, at best, one of several scaffolds that can hold a child while the larger work of repair is done.
But he is a scaffold. And in a country where so many children grow up without that scaffold, his work matters.
Mr. Msomi, on Father’s Day
I asked Mr. Msomi, near the end of our conversation, why he does this work. He didn’t reach for theory. He told me about his mother. He told me about being raised by her alone, about not having a father figure in his early years, about feeling, even now, the shape of that absence. And then he said: I want to close that gap.
That sentence has stayed with me. It is the cleanest description I have heard of what it means to be a social father. He cannot give his seventy-three learners the fathers they were owed. None of us can. But he can stand in front of them every morning, with the marking from last night still in his bag, and show them, for ten months of their lives, that there is at least one man in the world who will show up for them, who will know their names, who will hold them accountable, who will hand them work that is hard enough to matter. He can show the boys what a man without rage looks like. He can show the girls what a man without threat looks like. And in doing that, he is doing the most important kind of fathering there is: the kind that does not require biology, only commitment.
This Father’s Day, when we raise glasses to the fathers in our lives, I hope we also raise them to the men who stayed when they were not obliged to. The uncles. The coaches. The pastors. The school principals. And the rare, undervalued, often-suspected men in the Foundation Phase classrooms of this country, marking late into the night for seventy-three children who are not their own, and who, in every way that matters, kind of are.
But before you put this piece down, I want to ask you something. Not about Mr. Msomi. About you. If you have children in a Foundation Phase classroom, or a niece, a nephew, a grandchild — and you found out their teacher was a man — what was your first instinct? Relief, or hesitation? And if it was hesitation, where did that come from, and is it something you are willing to examine? If you sit on a School Governing Body, or know someone who does, have you ever asked how hiring decisions for early childhood posts are actually made, and on what assumptions? If you are a man — a father, an uncle, a coach, a mentor — are you in the lives of the children around you in a way that counts, or are you present in the ways that are comfortable and absent in the ways that are hard? Mr. Msomi is not an exceptional man in the sense of being unlike the rest of us. He is an ordinary man who decided that the gap in front of him was his to close. That decision is available to all of us. The only question is whether we are willing to make it.
Written by Michael Sterksen – Network Mobiliser, Teachers CAN
