Deculturation: an Afrocentric critique of B.M. Khaketla’s <i>Mosali a nkhola</i>

B.M. Khaketla claims, in the preface of his novel, “Mosali a nkhola”, that his motivation to write the story was an increase in the incidents of ritual murder among the Basotho in the early years of the British colonial occupation of Lesotho. However, Khaketla’s novel focuses more on other effects of colonialism on the Basotho social fabric than on “diretlo” (ritual murder). The only incident of ritual murder in the novel comes quite late in the story. Therefore, by employing an Afrocentric critical tool, the article argues that current perspectives promote skewed critical methods and that Khaketla’s novel is more about deculturation, i.e. the annihilation of the Basotho cultural identity, than it is about “diretlo”. To that effect the article will embark on a substantive analysis of Khaketla’s novel in order to clear misperceptions that have consigned African languages and literatures to the intellectual periphery and to re-locate them to the centre of academic discourse by advocating Afrocentricity as one of the primary African oriented methods of analysis