Shakespeare and the Coconuts. Natasha Distiller
designate English Literature as a formal field of study), and therefore the inheritances of English for South Africa, specifically in its implications for those of us in the economic and linguistic elite of the country. The African Renaissance, which depends in part on what Shakespeare has come to stand for in the neo-colonial world, uses this dependency to argue for a traditional Africanness. In its complex and contradictory cultural work, the concept of the African Renaissance makes clear that our post-colonial and post-apartheid present is constituted by loss and fracture. We must own this starting point, which goes right back to Plaatje, in order to explore our possibilities for the future, or we will remain stuck in the logic of our terrible past.
The African Renaissance was Thabo Mbeki’s baby, and it is no coincidence that this most eruditely self-fashioned of presidents was saturated with Shakespeare in his public persona. In the final chapter, I suggest that post-Polokwane and Mbeki’s spectacular fall from power, the familiar version of high-cultural Shakespeare now definitely stands for something un-South-African in the popular imagination. In the colonial and apartheid past, Shakespeare stood for empowerment in a socio-economic system dominated by ‘white’ culture. To know your Shakespeare was to contest your positioning as a ‘native’. Recently, however, Shakespeare seems to have come to stand for something else. The changed meaning of Shakespeare is related to the charged meaning of English, as a language and as a coconut identity in post-apartheid South Africa. As material inequalities continue to worsen, and as English remains the necessary pathway to economic advancement even as our education system deteriorates, the coconut becomes a figure of privilege increasingly accused of rejecting and so betraying his or her African roots.
Reclaiming the coconut
In an article published in 2007, the same year as Kopano Matlwa’s novel Coconut won the European Union Literary Award, Andile Mngxitama calls a new generation of ‘influential young people … neither black nor white’.8 Although they constitute a numerical minority, he says, ‘they are a cultural majority’. Mngxitama accuses this generation of Africans of being agents of colonialism along the lines of Fanon’s mimic men, ‘“black outside and white inside”’. He descries their lack of interest in their own history, and accuses them of being ‘agents of whiteness’ who will inherit the new South Africa and set the terms for a denigration of blackness, including black languages. While the political imperatives underlying this critique remain important – the production of an economic elite when poverty remains a dire issue, the lack of support for indigenous African languages, the youth’s relationship of disavowal to the country’s racialised history which allows inherited structures to perpetuate unchallenged – what I wish to refute in this book is the binary logic which continues to structure public discourse about who and what South Africans can and should be in relation to each other. Characterising this emerging elite as ‘white’ on the ‘inside’ reproduces a version of culture as capable of being authentically or inauthentically African, a version which is currently being deployed by the very political leaders who continue to let us down. It is also ignorant of the history Mngxitama wishes our youngsters would own. Perhaps if we begin to teach a version of South Africanness that is fundamentally coconutty, we can recapture the interest of the generation emerging as inheritors of that particular history. And I mean by this to remake the idea or reclaim the image of the coconut: Mngxitama invokes the commonsensical notion that a coconut is made of an outside and a differently ‘coloured’ inside.
My reclamation of the term is, of course, in part ironic and provocative. The coconut is useful as a psychologically loaded symbol, one which encodes racial histories and identity struggles. In arguing for using the icon anew, I am suggesting that its logic of outside and inside be refused, and that instead we celebrate what the charge of coconuttiness is trying to name in its derogatory way. As I will keep reiterating, I am not simultaneously arguing for a version of history which denies the oppression that was perpetuated in the name of racism, or the suffering that black people had to endure because they were black. That racialised past, and its consequences, are very much with us today. But I am arguing that there is also a version of South Africanness that has always existed, which cannot be captured by a binary logic, and which may be very productive of a way forward for our national imaginary. Because it is rooted in history, it is not like the anodyne rainbow nationhood that Mngxitama rightly objects to.
I use Shakespeare to demonstrate the genesis of and potential in our reformulated coconut possibilities. That this reclaimed coconuttiness has tended not to make it to our public performances, textual or political, is evidence of the ongoing power of the colonial and apartheid binary logic in which one is either/or: either authentically African, or European; either a purified and nostalgic version of black, or white (on the inside, or otherwise). As I argue in the final chapter, the ongoing power of this binary is reflective of very real ongoing inequalities which tend to remain raced, and of the existence of inherited structures of white privilege within which all South Africans have to try to make it. But at the same time, I also want to point out the ways in which discourses of authentic blackness and traitorous whiteness are easy political tools, which deny aspects of our history and our identities for expedient and dangerous agendas. These range from a murderous homophobia to a violent misogyny, to a form of political smokescreening, where colonial history is rhetorically deployed by leaders whose corrupt practices ensure they benefit from the system, the exploitative qualities of which they lay at the feet of white people.
Ultimately, I hope to make it clear that Shakespeare’s cultural value is, in our context, a complex signifier. While in the course of the arguments made here I do argue for some of the implications of the fact that English Literature as a discipline, and Shakespeare as one of its foundational figures, are both colonial imports developed to be colonising tools, I am not suggesting that Shakespeare therefore has no place in post-apartheid South Africa. I invoke the idea of the coconut, not to endorse its reductive and contained notions of race and identity, but to challenge those ideas and to reclaim the image of the black person worked on by history through English. Perhaps some South Africans have always been coconuts – that is, have internalised and been formed by a relation with English – and we should start to understand coconuttiness as a legitimate identity. I cannot, according to the logic of my argument, call it an authentic identity, since the language of authenticity has been too often invoked in the names of a putatively pure Africanness or a whiteness in need of protection from contamination. But I am suggesting that the messy in-betweenness, the mixed-up inside-outsideness of the coconut trope may be a more accurate descriptor of what some South African subjectivities have always been, since the region first encountered English. Ultimately, I argue, what we in post-apartheid South Africa need to leave behind are precisely those colonial and apartheid binaries which fail to describe who and what we – that complex, fractured, differential South African citizenry – are and, more importantly, who and what we can be.
Who are ‘we’?
‘We’ is a tenuously created category, stitched together with deep ambivalences of signification. May ‘we’ at least remember that, if nothing else.9
In the course of this book I will refer to ‘us’, South Africans. Given the diversity of people’s experiences of nationhood and citizenship and the vast discrepancies in access to services, living and working conditions, and other class-, race-, and gender-inflected differences of experience in this country, it is important to specify that the ‘we’ to which I refer cannot be taken to mean all South Africans. Indeed, the history of access to literacy in English in this country, and particularly to exposure to canonical English Literature taught in the traditional way, has always been class-inflected for most South Africans. Those with access to mission-school education, in colonial times, were by and large the ones who became writers in English. Under apartheid, Bantu Education inflected English Literature teaching very differently for most black South Africans. So in the first place, ‘we’ are those South Africans of a limited range of classes and literacies that enabled us to encounter English, Eng Lit, and Shakespeare, in ways which made it possible to enjoy and sometimes own the literature, and to profit from fluency in English.
Secondly, although most white South Africans will not have a personal identity investment in the idea of African tradition or reclaimed Africanness (although some do – presumably