Worth crying for?

Kopano Matlwa’s second novel is about an uneasy reunion between two old flames, the black, successful principal of Sekolo sa Ditlhora (School of Excellence), Mohumagadi, and the white William ‘Bill’ Thomas, now a priest who has fallen on hard times. The equation of Mohumagadi to Oprah Winfrey’s school is immediately apparent.

William is given the task of presiding over the detention of four errant pupils for a period of six weeks. It turns out the children were caught showing each other their genitalia in the school bus. It is not an easy task as Bill has to face up to the little but shocking impertinences of the children, Mohumagadi’s open hostility and her stubborn memories of hers and Bill’s past. The narrative is largely an emotional rollercoaster for all involved, the adults who cannot resolve their issues and the little 10-year-olds who have to contend with their absent parents. Though young, the children mouth big words and use explicitly sexual concepts that are far removed from their young lives. Highly emotionally involved, and unbelievably intelligent, the children are regrettably a blight in a novel that appears rushed thanks to its erroneous editing and partially developed characters. One cannot help but wonder whether Matlwa allowed her second book to be published in the desperate attempt to satisfy her publishers’ opportunistic branding of her work in superlative terms, much like the fantastical children she portrays. Needless to say, this happens at the expense of the quality of her work.

The novel reads like an attempt at addressing the state of the South African nation at its sweet 16. But there is no sweetness at all in its imaginary of post-apartheid South Africa. The country comes across as a wasteland of displaced moral values and dishonesty; a betrayal of its founding imaginary of reconciliation, nation-building and non-racialism. Parents are no longer around for their children, only too happy to develop their careers and pursue hollow celebrity. Others simply instil a disdain for God in their children, creating a moral vacuum that is not good for growing minds.

Importantly, the narrative does not struggle to help the readers navigate their fingers towards the authorship of these failures, the new black middle class. Apparently, black people, chiefly represented by the protagonist Mohumagadi, are caught in a time-warp of anti-white-ism and are not prepared to forgive the past. Against this sorry state, the novel suggests that it is not wise to cry over ‘spilt milk’.

The motif of ‘spilt milk’ recurs in the encounters between the book's bitter protagonist, Mohumagadi, and her past in the form of Bill and any symbol of whiteness. In spite of the passing of 15 years since her abortive romance, she cannot bear the memory of her disappointment when the church fathers separated her from William. Even William does not escape her deep-seated hatred for white people when he happens at the school one morning, to begin the work of presiding over the children’s detention. But the consequences are not as pretty as the children who, having harvested liberal doses of Mohumagadi’s vision, also throw anti-white sentiments about. Poor, disgraced Bill is the first in line to taste the bitter taste of Mohumagadi’s poisoned chalice to the children.

In spite of her apparent progressiveness, Mohumagadi simply fits the bill of a fascist and atheist black matriarch who pollutes the minds of the precocious pupils. Her cultural consciousness finds resonance in the buildings, gardens and playgrounds of the school which, ostensibly, bear out her disdain for whites. The campus is bedecked with insignia of Africa’s historical memory and political consciousness. In this, the novel makes the gross error of lending to Africanist political and cultural thought, the function of a blanket anti-white attitude. In doing so, it adopts a seriously misplaced aesthetic choice and ideological course.

While the symbols conventionally stand for a worldview with a historical pedigree and enduring cultural and political value, the novel puts a spin on them – in it, they simply envelope the pathologies of the black middle class. As the bearers of pathologies, the black middle class simply has to spew its bile against agonistic and therefore, innocent whites who, the narrative implies, have either done their penance or are simply too flawed to be denied a sympathetic embrace. After all, 16 years is a long time; the world has moved on.

But at no point is Bill’s whiteness qualitatively ascribed to his past. He is simply Bill, a white priest who disgraced himself through sexual misdemeanours. Yet, his interaction with the children and Mohumagadi foregrounds the attitude of the latter in terms of her racial consciousness. Thus, the novel puts a racial tag on Mohumagadi's thoughts and actions, but effectively denies Bill the same. This allows it to pass a too-easy value judgment on black people and to absolve whites of their historical role in the past and of post-1994 social and political problems in South Africa. Perhaps the motif should not be spilt milk, but the inaccessible, copious amounts still carried in many buckets across South Africa’s farmlands. The issue at the end of the day is not bitterness in and of itself, but the enduring racialised contradictions of post-apartheid South Africa and the resentments it causes.

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* Kopano Matlwa's 'Spilt Milk' is published by Jacana Media (978-1770097919, 2010).
* Litheko Modisane is A.W. Mellon post-doctoral fellow in the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative, University of Cape Town. He writes in a personal capacity.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.