Shakespeare and the Coconuts. Natasha Distiller
of gender and class politics in the development of English Studies, from as far back as the Renaissance.15
In Shakespeare Studies in particular, the universal Shakespeare which is one of the cornerstones of the discipline came under fire for being classed, raced, and gendered. Furthermore, ‘his’ supposed apolitical universality was revealed to be ideologically complicit with the oppressive bourgeois practices of the state.16 Shakespeare’s putative universality was interrogated in material terms, and responsible historical accounts attempted to trace the process through which ‘his’ reputation was accrued, instead of assuming its self-perpetuating and self-evident nature.17 It is these investigations which have made possible the challenge to the universal Shakespeare as self-evidently the best human culture has to offer, when that apparently universal human culture happens to belong to a specific time and place and does not, in fact, speak equally or equally easily to all humans.
Despite these academic ‘discoveries’, Shakespeare retains ‘his’ place in popular culture as the marker of high human culture.18 In a South African context, this positionality has been used to invoke a range of references, resonances, and self-fashionings, as the rest of this book illustrates. For now, the point I wish to stress is that despite a history which clearly demonstrates a vexed, complex, ambivalent, contradictory position for Shakespeare in our region, and from there for the Englishness ‘he’ has come to stand for, Shakespeare keeps coming up as a signifier of a binary relation. This relation is more or less overtly raced and classed, depending on the situation.
That Shakespeare keeps standing for something else – culture, whiteness, literature (implicitly English) – is clear in the commotion which followed a group of teachers’ suggestion to the Gauteng Education Department in 2001 that certain Shakespeare plays be banned from school syllabi. Plays earmarked for removal included Anthony and Cleopatra and Othello (for being racist), Julius Caesar (‘because it elevates men’), and King Lear (for being ‘full of violence and despair’).19 These teachers were clearly motivated by some sort of awareness of the findings of the work outlined above, and trying to be responsible about the ideological power of Shakespeare and the messages being transmitted through education. But both the attack on the Shakespearean texts, and the responses in the press, spoke to a host of other anxieties underlying what this literature stood for in people’s minds.20 This is not to deny that any discussion of the details, role, or purpose of English literary studies in post-apartheid South Africa must take cognisance of the debates about Shakespeare as an agent of various kinds of colonisation, as well as the debates about colonising languages in neo-colonial situations.21 Shakespeare, as the icon of Eng Lit and of a particular kind of cultured Englishness, remains a potent signifier of what English stands for in South Africa, even if what exactly that is, is variable depending on the times and the person or community.
English in South Africa
If there is a lingua franca in South Africa, it is Zulu.22 But English is the language of power – the means to social and economic advancement – as it was in the days of the mission schools. From the early 1840s, missionaries facilitated the first printed vernacular texts. These were all religious. However, South Africans wrote Christian texts not only because they were converts: as colonisation impacted on the existing social, political, and economic structures, Christianity and an education in English and the Englishness it transmitted were the means to succeed in the new system.23 In post-apartheid South Africa, English remains the language it is necessary to know in order to advance economically and politically, and so socially.24
Despite never having been the most-spoken language, in other words, English was the most powerful language during the development of formal education in the region, and the social changes this system helped to effect. Leon de Kock points to the inescapable multiple violences of this history when he says:
[T]he orthodoxy of English as a dominant medium of educational discourse in South Africa, and the institutionalisation of this discourse (by which English ‘literature’ is privileged as an area of study), was won by blood … the ascendancy of English as a principal medium for social empowerment among many black South Africans was secured in the nineteenth century on frontier battlefields by colonial soldiers.25
The supremacy of English within the educated elite carried through into the formation of the liberation movement, whose leaders were from this elite. With the passing of the Bantu Education Act in 1953 as part of the formalisation of apartheid, the mission schools were effectively closed during the 1950s. The Bantu Education Act was designed to terminate access to the social and economic mobility enabled by a mission-school education because of the threat this educated class fraction posed, as a source of leadership, and to the increasingly white-protectionist labour market. It is from this fraction that the ANC was born, and thus from which the upper echelons of the current political ruling class in South Africa have emerged, at least until the presidency of Jacob Zuma (this change is significant for my final conclusions about the symbolic status Shakespeare now occupies in the South African public sphere).
English was not only a tool of self- as well as social empowerment under colonialism. It was also useful during apartheid. Es’kia Mphahlele, one of our finest writers in English from the mission-educated generations, has written about the ways in which English functioned as a language of resistance during apartheid.26 He also spoke about the personal gains brought by a fluency in English as the language and the culture that helped to shape the boys who attended the mission schools: ‘English which was not our mother tongue, gave us power, power to master the external world which came to us through it.’27 If English has always been a language of personal power as well as an aspirational language, its status as such was exacerbated by apartheid policies of ‘retribalisation’ and by Bantu Education, which made it clear that education in the venacular was intended to be second-rate.28
Another reason English enjoyed its status as the language of resistance under apartheid was the (now problematised) position of Afrikaans as the language of the oppressor. As the language of the educated, English is implicated in class hierarchies which are more important now than they were under apartheid, when the exigencies of Struggle called for the sublimation of differences among the oppressed. In post-apartheid South Africa, as Graham Pechey points out, ‘[f]luency in English is virtually synonymous with literacy’,29 which means with class advantage. Coconut ends up despairing of this fact, as it concludes with the words of a clearly good man whom Fikile meets on the train, and who talks about watching his daughter on the playground at her elite school. At first he acknowledges the integration that an education in English has enabled:
And then suddenly a little chocolate girl walks past me, hand in hand with the cutest half-metre milk bar I have ever seen in my life. Both of them are chatting away … He smiles at the memory. Wow! I thought, look how happy they are.
But then he goes on:
They were so joyful, those kids. But, you know, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were only happy because they didn’t know. Don’t get me wrong, the school is remarkable, it really is … [J]ust by looking at Palesa, you can just see that she is such an inspired little girl with so much to offer the world. Compared to other children her age in the township, who go to black schools, she is miles ahead … But, I can’t shake a certain feeling … [L]istening to all those little black faces yelping away in English … just broke my heart … Standing at the edge of that playground, I watched little spots of amber and auburn become less of what Africa dreamed of and more of what Europe thought we ought to be.30
Palesa’s father could be describing a child at a colonial mission school when he speaks of the ‘opportunities those children get at that school’,31 and the way her education positions her as someone with ‘so much to offer the world’, specifically because it equips her with a fluency in English and an acculturation to the dominant ideological system. Of course, notable again is that the coconuts in this book are all female, with the exception of the failed coconut, Fikile’s uncle. This is one change which marks progress of a sort from then till now: opportunities are available to some girls as well as to their