Shakespeare and the Coconuts. Natasha Distiller
by sliding back into the reified, binary positions exemplified by ‘Africa’ and ‘Europe’ in the mind of Palesa’s dad.
Scholars from a range of disciplines have examined the implications for elite South Africans of the hegemonic dominance of English. The mission school disseminated what Graham Duncan has called ‘coercive agency’:32 along with Christianity, the missions taught a colonial and colonising ideology which shaped their students even as the black South African men resisted and responded to the message that their cultures and languages were in need of improvement and replacement. Scholars of mission schools and their effects, and the early South African writers in English, all emphasise the ‘ambiguous qualification’33 which an education in English language and literary culture entailed. For example, in his autobiography Tell Freedom, Peter Abrahams, one of the first black South African writers to acquire an international career and the first to write an autobiography in English, details the effects of his mission-school education in pre-apartheid days. It gave him his vocation (specifically, he says, Shakespeare inspired in him the desire to write, and to become educated in English literature). It gave him a deep sense of justice and of a shared humanity through the Christian ideology he was taught. It also made the hypocrisies of South Africa in the world outside the schoolroom walls inescapably obvious and intolerable. And, as he goes on to chart in his life story, his education makes it impossible for him to return to his family and the community from which he came.34
As Abrahams suggests, the Englished South African subject has been described as split. While a postmodern understanding would see all subjectivity as split or fractured, and would understand this as unproblematic, the splitting effects of English have been repeatedly presented as fracturing a subject who would otherwise be authentically whole: in saving, English also spoils. Bloke Modisane writes bitterly of the experience of being a ‘Situation’, ‘the eternal alien between two worlds’35 as a result of his propensity for a cultured ‘white society’, membership of which was denied him by early apartheid legislation and attitudes. Duncan traces this split condition back to the mission schools, describing how Lovedale created ‘dislocated individuals and groups’, alienated from their societies of birth and also excluded from ‘the Western European lifestyle they aspired to’.36 But the Englished South African’s ‘Situation’ can be read as something other than the position of eternal exclusion, particularly if one is looking pre- and post-apartheid.
English has always played a more complex role in South African identities and societies than Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s famous explication allows. I do not wish to deny the region’s painful history of struggle, to celebrate its effects, or to blithely overlook the reality of ongoing relations of material and discursive power kept in place by the dominance of English resulting from this history. However, colonised subjects made use of colonial tools of oppression, often in order to construct themselves as resisting subjects, albeit with complications and complicities. This use implies a process that resulted not only in the cultural colonisation of the African mind, but also in African ownership of colonial texts, icons, and languages. It is a contradictory and traumatic process, with ramifications for identity on personal and cultural levels. But language can become a tool for the comprador speaker, because comprador identity, the access to the colonial world gained though language use, comes about not solely through the acquisition of the colonial language, but ‘through the act of speaking itself, the act of self-assertion involved in using the language of the colonizer’.37 The subject speaking English in South Africa will always be more than the sum of the colonial process; the forms taken by agency cannot be underestimated.38 If millions of Africans by now speak English, is English not an African language, one as deeply implicated in history as any other language – not universal, in other words, and not straightforwardly liberating, but ‘authentically’, contradictorily African? Like any other aspect of identity? Like the African coconut?
Solomon Plaatje: The first South African coconut
For elite African men at the turn of the century of high colonialism, English was a very important medium as well as a personal and artistic source of useful and sometimes enriching content. It was, as it remains, a means for socio-economic advancement. It was a mine of literary wealth, interesting for its own sake and for the messages about universal humanity conveyed through the teaching of Eng Lit. Deploying English and the literature that went with it was the means to publicly stake a claim to personhood in the terms of the ruling regime; it enabled a demonstration and provided a vocabulary that was meant to help in the fight against colonial patronage and its hardening racism. Leon de Kock has shown how and why African intellectuals seeking to forge a literary and human presence embraced English as a ‘universal’ and universalising language. He notes also the complexities and complicities of this position:
The writing of ‘literature’ in English was an uneasy negotiation: in its dense web of textuality were multiple constraints and restraints. One didn’t just take English and make literature in a vacuum … Many early works of black South African writing in English attest to this unease in the very forms, idioms, and registers employed in writing for a readership that did not really exist in any significant numbers except as an imaginary community where English and the values it was held to represent approximated the ideals of civil egalitarianism … English was a discursive site riven with contradiction – offering entry to a larger world, a more global imaginary, but hedged by the constraints of a colonizing ideology.39
De Kock goes on to offer an argument for recognising the complexity of African identifications with British identity and Western acculturation, for taking seriously the desire to participate in and to own what these things offered and stood for: civility, modernity, Christian brotherhood, equality. He argues that the South African response to colonisation was never one of pure oppositionality; instead, African leaders used the discourses, ideas, and ideologies brought by the colonisers to demand inclusion into the civil imaginary and into state structures, and sought to counter racism by calling for the recognition of their ability to live up to all the terms designated by the colonisers as the marks of human development and ‘civilisation’.
Equally, Bhekizizwe Peterson has recently stressed how writing in English by African intelligentsia at the turn of the twentieth century was an act of self-assertion, a performance of African modernity: ‘The new African intelligentsia drew on their mastery of literacy and African orature in order to claim and defend their rights as modern citizens.’40 They engaged with British imperialism in the terms in which it presented itself to them: as a viable ally against Afrikaner nationalism. Nonetheless, they occupied a vexed position. As loyal citizens of Britain, they articulated a commitment to, and in so doing called upon, the liberal values being asserted in the name of Empire. At the same time they faced ongoing and worsening hardship as the hypocrisy of British liberal discourse regarding race in South Africa became increasingly clear. English became at once a resource in the fight for political rights and for the rights of indigenous cultures, a creolising force in personal identities and in cultural developments, a marker of acculturation and modernisation, a false promise … complex and contradictory indeed.41
We could reformulate these nuanced descriptions of the complexities of identification and performances at the time, as signifiers of a reformulated coconuttiness. This new definition reclaims the pejorative term as signifying a form of elite African modernity that is as much a ‘true’ part of African history, and Struggle history, as any other. We see all the markers of this coconuttiness in the work of Solomon Plaatje, and the double-edgedness of it in the progression of his life’s writing as it responded to the events he lived through.
Plaatje’s life story is by now well known; I will not rehearse it in detail here.42 Born in 1876, he was a man of extraordinary ability and range of activity. He was a founding member of the political organisation that would become the ANC, a leading journalist, a diarist and letterist, a linguist, a professional interpreter (he spoke nine languages), a ‘native’ ethnographer deeply rooted in his Barolong identity, a Christian, the first black South African novelist in English, and the first translator of Shakespeare in southern Africa. He also wrote political texts which are literary in their skill, and travelled internationally campaigning for the increasingly receding rights of black South Africans as the twentieth