Abstract:
Contemporary South African campus fiction has always been concerned with
questions of power, being, and knowledge production. Kopano Matlwa’s novel
Spilt Milk, like most campus fiction, evokes and challenges the South African
academy, and looks at ways of making the school and/or university a hospitable
place. Unlike Matlwa’s sister novels Coconut and Period Pain, Spilt Milk has
received few scholarly reviews. I examine how the novel reveals and can be
read as a starting point in exploring the intellectual dimensions of colonialism.
I investigate the decolonial concept of the coloniality of knowledge and
Matlwa’s seeming quest for decolonial education by foregrounding the
educational institution Sekolo sa Ditlhora as the prime setting of the novel. The
argument around the coloniality of knowledge I advance here is akin to current
debates seeking to decolonise (or Africanise) education in South African
schools and universities. Theoretically, this article draws from the decolonial
ideas on the coloniality of knowledge whose foundations were laid by the
Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, who suggested that, for global
domination, colonisers imposed their own modes of knowing and methods of
producing knowledge. The concept of the coloniality of knowledge in Matlwa’s
fiction is multifaceted since it speaks to the colonisation of space, education, languages, and the ways of life of the colonised people. Following the 2015
#RhodesMustFall protests at South African universities, I argue that the
characterisation of Mohumagadi, and her foregrounding of Africa as an
epistemic site from which she interprets the world, is an attempt at moving the
centre.
