I consider myself fortunate to have been surrounded by close friends when I received the call. It was 2011, and I was at the Kimberley Diamond Cup. For the South African skate scene, it was a momentous gathering – the first time all the crews were together in one place. In retrospect, it was a wonderfully irresponsible occasion. It was a cold September morning. We were at the campsite, curing our hangovers, when my phone rang. I answered the call, and looked up to meet my brother’s eyes. “Your father died yesterday. It was a microlight accident,” Martin said through his tears. “Thank you.” I put the phone down, walked over to Joubert, and whispered to him that we needed to talk. Away from the group, we cried for a moment. We decided it best to keep the news of our father’s death to ourselves until the weekend was over.

When I was four, they filed for divorce. Ma had to make it work on her own with the two of us. We travelled with her across the country. At first, we saw Pa once a week as he was running a project close by; later, we saw him only once or twice a year. After every visit, I would cry myself to sleep when he left. On birthdays we would get presents from him with letters written in Ma’s handwriting.

I was caught smoking cigarettes across the road from our primary school at a friend’s house. The news was carried to Pa just before our visit to Maputo for the school holidays. Anticipating the worst, I stayed quiet when he picked us up from the airport. He was pissed off initially, but with a smiling understanding, he told us the story of how he was busted smoking cigarettes with his two brothers behind the shed at the house in Witrivier. Oupa had smelled it on them and disciplined Peet, the youngest, first. Pa was next. A hiding for smoking, and then another for failing in his responsibilities to his younger brother. Joggie, the eldest, got it the worst.

Pa had an office in Maputo, and over the years Joubert and I spent visiting him there, we became familiar with the city. During the day, he would let us skate around by ourselves and explore until the sun set. He seemed to be an important man. To our adolescent eyes, he was The Man. People listened to him when he spoke. We listened to him. “Do something right, or don’t do it at all,” he always said. His work consumed him. I frequently felt something was chasing my father – he was in a perpetual hurry. At almost two metres tall, we were always trying to catch up to him. His long legs carried his blue jeans just out of reach.

When Pa was sixteen, he fainted while cycling from Witrivier to Nelspruit. When he woke up from the coma a week or two later, he had lost his sense of smell. He only started regaining his smell in his forties. Pa always said he missed the scent of rain falling on dry roads the most.

Once or twice, on a road trip through Namibia and Botswana for my matric holiday, Pa stopped and stepped out by himself to consider the landscape. Remnants of a gate or broken stone walls were of no particular interest to me, but I sensed he recalled the place. Growing up, we were aware that he spent time in the army. We saw the uniformed photograph. But we never discussed any details regarding his conscription, nor did we have any inclination to ask him about it.

Six years after his death, I was invited to attend a photography masterclass in Kenya. It was decided that Joubert would join me there two weeks before the class started. It was a pilgrimage of sorts, a return. We interviewed many of the people who saw Pa in his last days. We heard he was seen strolling on the beach by himself, seemingly content. Joubert and I mourned. I photographed.

When I presented to the class, Akinbodi said: “You have to go deeper.”

On returning home, I asked Oom Joggie for Pa’s hard drives. I was looking for something but quickly realised it would be a mammoth task to work with Pa’s immense photographic archive. Desert landscapes, portraits of people he met on the road, aerial shots, intimate photographs of his lovers. I felt I was investigating someone, looking for secrets, something I might have missed. Something to fill the holes. But really, I was looking for anything to bring him back to life. Instead, I found a document called My Decisions.

“I joined and did what I did because I wanted to kill people.”

In this letter to himself, Pa lays bare the source of his darkness and articulates the consequences of his actions. It was always there under the surface, waiting, only to burst out at a moment’s notice, breaking his nine iron against a tree. That thing me and Joubert were most afraid of. That fucking temper. The frustration. The suffering.

The letter contains two parts. In the first, Pa offers his motivations, convictions and justifications for joining the army and to fight in the Border War. A stupid boy. He confesses to the horrific acts of violence he took part in and witnessed. In the second, Pa narrates his love life – the latter forever haunted by the former. Quickly feeling trapped, he sabotaged all his relationships. The way he dealt with his anger is one I inherited. When I, too, grow angry with the people I care most about, I become an imitation of him.

After reading the letter a few times over and showing it to Joubert, we tried to make sense of the scale of its implications. Is this shit real? Did he really do these things? Why the fuck was this never discussed?

I then called the psychotherapist, who encouraged Pa to write. I was met with silence – patient privacy extends even into death. I had to find out more. My only choice was to visit the family and confront them. I needed to hear from them what happened to their seventeen-year-old son and brother.

I sat around the deserts of their kitchen tables, begging for water. Any and all the childhood stories about Pa they could muster from memory, I soaked up. They understood what I was doing. It was difficult for them, yet I felt strangely enriched by the knowledge of their upbringing.

We read the essay together.

My father killed and tortured people. This much is true. If his time as a conscript is a seed, a forest of consequences has grown from it. I do not wish to apologise – this is not my place. But neither do I want, inadvertently, to stir up feelings of guilt. Most importantly, I wish to stray as far as possible from any notions of victimhood. I wish only to understand how my family arrived where we are today and to what extent I am a product of my father.

In a small town in the South of France, I was invited to attend an exhibition of South African photographers. I met a man there. He was in his sixties, and I called him Oom Theo. He had an ease about him; unbothered by the crowd and overjoyed he could speak Afrikaans with me. We discussed how he came to be in Nîmes, how he learnt the language and married a French woman. When he was called upon to report for conscription, Oom Theo said fuck that. He left his family behind in South Africa and spent his youth touring around Europe after his favourite bands. He claimed to know the secrets of Jim Morrison’s death and even saw Pink Floyd live.

What he doesn’t know about, however, are his shoulders and the weight they never had to carry.Whether South African or Angolan, black, white or of Khoi descent, The Border War conscript and his family, hobbles uphill.

The letter my father wrote to himself does not appear in this book. To include it would only overpower and distract from the story. My story follows no narrative and offers instead a slow accumulation of traces, a collection of half-finished thoughts and imperfect recollections.

I ask that you look carefully at the images as both discrete pictures and the many parts of a fragmented whole. I want you to be confused. I want you to understand how the photographs and their sequence reflect my process; its segues and false-starts, cul-de-sacs and forks. My memories of Pa, weaving through South Africa’s recent past, find imperfect expression in my family’s archives. However private, their archive extends considerations on the Church and State as inseparable ideological pillars of that generation. Other images confront my father as a body and still more test my relationship with my brother. Together, they offer an oblique portrait of a man and a country, the histories of which continue to shiver along my spine. In scratching where it doesn’t itch, in provoking ghosts, I’ve realised that my present situation, who I am, is a direct consequence of my father’s time as a conscript and everything that led up to it.