The right to education seems to be endemically rooted in postcolonial literature, no matter the geographical and historical context. For instance, starting from Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Zimbabwean Nervous Conditions (1988) and moving to Anita Desai’s Indian novel Fasting, Feasting (1999), and then to the literary case of Beatrice Culleton Moisonier, In Search of April Raintree (1999), a Canadian Métis who experienced abduction from home and seclusion in a Residential School—an experience which is not far from that of the Aboriginal children of the Stolen Generation in Australia—equal rights to education are claimed both within traditional communities and within divided societies.

Athol Fugard’s novel Tsotsi (1979) also seems to foreground education as a divide between the two main characters: Tsotsi and Boston. Immediately, Tsotsi’s silences and his apparent lack of rhetorical skills are opposed to Boston’s loquacity and refined language, though behind both of them lies a chasm of lack or abrupt interruption of education. The novel certainly echoes the effects of the famous and fateful Bantu Education Legislation of the apartheid period, it echoes the Soweto’s riots of 1976, and anticipates the School boycotts of the 1980s in South Africa. Here, criminality appears as the only possible alternative to education for the youths of the townships. The paper will try to place Tsotsi within this context, as well as within a wider debate about the rights to education.