Decolonizing Indigenous Fatherhood: Understanding Our Masculinity beyond Imposed Meaning

Last Updated on March 18, 2025

Decolonizing Indigenous Fatherhood: Understanding Our Masculinity beyond Imposed Meaning

To start this engagement, I would like to give you a specific contextualize notion of Indigenous fatherhood as interpreted from the relational paradigm of Ubuntuism. This Indigenous African paradigm of Ubuntuism was first given to me through our Indigenous African oral structure of communication. Given that I left Zimbabwe at the age of 21 and have lived in Canada for 25 years, I have had to nurture my Ubuntu scholarship through centering my childhood memories of Ubuntu teachings, while also researching texts as a way of addressing the gaps in my memories or as a way of gaining new knowledge. In doing this, I have engaged through dialogue with other Indigenous scholars who center their personal, political and spiritual realities of relational connectivity, which embodies Ubuntuism. Doing this has helped me find new ways to communicate how we as Indigenous peoples matter to each other in the world, while also communicating that Ubuntuism is relational. In our convergent and divergent stories, relational Ubuntu has guided our daily actions of liberating Indigenous fatherhood, which we as Ubuntu cannot talk about without talking about motherhood and other-mothering because in the colonial context and beyond, it is women who have played the largest role in fathering us. It is women, who have reminded us about our roles as fathers and other-fathers. My centering of Indigenous men’s fathering and other-fathering as decolonizing everyday actions, is intimately intertwined and connected to women’s every day actions of caring and nurturing children. After all, it is the Indigenous African work on mothering and other-mothering by Dr. Wane, which has made me more intentional about how I can nurture and care for our children as an Indigenous man beyond my own biological relational connections.

As I engage you using the Ubuntu relational paradigm, it is important that I convey to you what Ubuntu is; how it relates to you; why it should matter to you; and why it matters to our everydayness.  Ubuntu is an Indigenous African philosophical and ethical system of thought, from which definitions of everyday humanness, togetherness and the social politics of difference arises.[1] Ubuntuism can also be viewed as a complex worldsense (beyond privileging the single sense of site as the central sense in knowledge acquisition) that holds in tension the contradictions of trying to highlight our uniqueness as human beings among other human beings. So to engage the everyday politics and tensions of the human condition in a diverse world, the Indigenous worldsense of Ubuntu centers relational reciprocal engagement in the web of life. A good example of this kind of relational reciprocal engagement as guided by Ubuntu is conveyed in how our community of friends in Halifax, Nova Scotia has other- fathered and other-mothered our children as part of the everydayness of childcare. Our friends have babysat so we could get a break from giving childcare to our kids, they have played with our children, educated our children, fed our children, told our children stories and listened to our children’s stories. I believe these everyday acts of Ubuntuness are important for decolonizing Indigenous child care and centering men in child care because as Indigenous men we cannot leave all the work of childcare with our women folks. I hope I have made it clear how I use Ubuntuism as the Indigenous paradigm for understanding and exploring individual actions that add to the collective actions of decolonizing fatherhood by contemplating the Indigenous notion of other-fathering through Ubuntuism.

In March 2015, I went to Hawaii for the first time to attend the program exchange between University of Hawaii’s Indigenous Politics Program and the University of Victoria’s Indigenous Governance program. The titled of this exchange was Piko: Convergence of Resurgence. The first thing that struck me was the strong presence of children and babies at an academic gathering. More impressively, I observed sisters and brothers other-mothering and other-fathering the children and babies as was needed. If the child’s biological mother or father was attending to another task, one of the other sisters or brothers automatically stepped in to nurture and attend to the needs of the child.  I watched these Indigenous women and men regenerate and decolonize mothering and fathering through their everyday actions of other-mothering and other-fathering. This led me to reflect on the prominent African Indigenous scholar, Dr. Wane’s writing on other-mothering. Dr. Wane talks about how other women (and men in some situations) care for children in our communities. In her scholarship on Indigenous African mothering, she communicated that mothering is more than the biological act of creating a child and she informs us that, “Our mothers, aunties, sisters and community mothers carried us on their backs.”[2] Dr. Wane has named this community mothering as other-mothering. Meaning, we are all responsible to mother beyond our own biological children. So here I was in Hawai’i at a very important Indigenous Governance gathering and I was wondering if we as Indigenous men were aware that we were other-fathering when we cared for children beyond our own biology. I question what it would mean to Indigenous men to have their caring named as other-fathering? Would other Indigenous men care? Would they see themselves reflected? As I dismiss the importance of other-fathering to Indigenous men, I started to reflect on my own experience.

I was other-mothered and other-fathered, because the colonial project and its governing structures of white supremacy fragmented my family through the creations of colonial state boundaries, colonial reserves as a way for stealing our lands and imposing colonial taxation, which led to forced labour migrations. Under these colonially created realities I was born in Zimbabwe, in the rural lands of Makoni on the colonially created reserve of Chendmuya to Joyce Nyamunda. This makes me thankful to my Shona relatives on my Amai’s (mother) side. Without them we would have no life. I am because they are. This is the genealogical blood memory that connects me to my maternal family. Yet our Ubuntu Indigenous traditions dictate that when I am in the Shona territory of Zimbabwe, I am a welcomed familial visitor as my rightful place is with my paternal family according to our Ubuntu traditions. Through my Baba’s (father) lineage, I am Maseko Ngoni from LiZulu, which is on the colonial border of Malawi and Mozambique (again we see how colonialism fragmented our Indigenous nations). My Baba is Peter Dee Mucina and my totem is Khomba. Due to high colonial taxes which forced Indigenous Africans to migrate to colonially dominated, white settler spaces, I grew up in Zimbabwe. The colonially created reserve of Chendmuya could not sustain the needs of my family, so my father had to leave his family and go to the city of Harare to find a job as a cheap laborer but his sporadic jobs did not pay him enough to support his growing family. Many years later, my mother reported to me that she did unspeakable things to try and keep us alive, but as hard as she tried she saw her babies die one by one from malnutrition and poverty. Colonially fragmented from each other, Amai and Baba struggled against the colonially imposed poverty, while being isolated from each other. It was inevitable that the colonial created white supremacy governance structure would make them evaluate each other against its colonial expectations of capitalistic accumulation. Not surprising they found each other to be failures in the colonial capitalistic structure of white supremacy. Again my Amai reports that it was around this time period in their lives that my Baba started having psychotic mental health breakdowns.

Fearing that I would die next from malnutrition and poverty, my Amai and her family demanded that my Baba come and take me away. This is how I became the child that was raised by the community. I learned everyday actions of being an Ubuntu family member, like cutting wood, cooking food, cleaning the home, preparing the fields for crops, and caring for younger kids because community members took the time to other-father and other-mother me. I know I was other-fathered by the other Indigenous Ubuntu men who let Baba and I stay with them illegally in the servants’ quarters. I was other-fathered by the older Indigenous Ubuntu boy who slept in the phone booth with me because I was scared of being beaten by my own biological father. I was other-fathered by the Indigenous servants at the orphanage who loved and cared for me when I wanted nothing to do with them because they were Black and I wanted the power of white supremacy. I was other-mothered by Ubuntu women that fed me, let me practice caring for a baby with their baby children and I was also other-mothered by White women who educated me on how to survive in a White man’s world. Other-father and other-mothering is our last chance as Indigenous communities to decolonize and resist white supremacy and its governing structures of colonial violence, dispossession and capitalistic accumulation. It is disastrous when other-mothering and other-fathering is not done enough, I know because I remember experiencing and seeing the consequence of it in our all boys orphanage in Harare. But let me also communicate how simple everyday other-fathering can also be. When I am out at the park playing with my children and I notice a child being left out, I invite that child to play with us. I have offered hugs, said I love you to other peoples’ children, wiped running noses and made time to play soccer with a child who needed just a moment of my time. This is other-fathering, do you remember it? Have you experienced it? Will you help me when I do not know if I am fathering the right way? Can we teach each other this kind of Indigenous resurgence as decolonizing masculinity? Other-fathering is political action that is grounded in relational loving respect. Now that I have reminded you of our Indigenous responsibility to other-father, let us do this work so that we support and work in balance with the hard work being done by Indigenous women. This summer, Nandi and Khumalo, our daughter and son, received so much everyday acts of other-fathering and other-mothering from our community of friends in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They started having a hard time determining, which people were blood family and which people were community family. This is other-fathering and other-mothering done well. Let us share this knowledge with future generations. Now that we are connected by this story, where do I end and you begin, could breath, connect us to the cycle of life, Ubuntu.

[1] The definition of Ubuntu that I offer here comes from a more in-depth definition that I offer in Mucina, Devi Dee. 2013. “Ubuntu Orality as a Living Philosophy.” The Journal of Pan African Studies, Volume 6, Number 4, 18 – 35.

[2] This quote is drawn from p. 108 in the work of  Wane, N. N. (2000). Reflections on Mutuality of Mothering: Women, Children and   Othermothering. Association of Research in Mothering Journal, 2(2), 105-116 (A-12).