Shakespeare and the Coconuts. Natasha Distiller
but he did have connections to the mission-school system. He grew up and was partially educated, until 1894, at the mission station at Pniel. He died in 1932, still fighting for the dwindling political and linguistic rights of black South Africans.
In terms of my argument, Plaatje is the archetypal coconut for a number of reasons. He was ‘[a]rguably the pre-eminent literary figure present at the moment of the first formation of South Africa as a single political entity’.44 This literary skill was manifest in both English and Setswana, and in his complex creations and translations between the two cultures, their literatures, and the forms those literatures took.
Indeed, Plaatje has been read as the first, and the most proficient, African writer in the acts of translation in all senses: ‘Plaatje was … literally, almost quintessentially, interdiscursive.’ This interdiscursivity includes the ways in which he incorporated orature into his writing, allowing African practices and values to interpenetrate with the English in which he was also highly skilled.45 As a result he created what is arguably a truly South African literary discourse, made up of both/and, not either/ or. For example, Deborah Seddon has written about Plaatje’s interdiscursive mediation between Setswana orality and Shakespeare, arguing that he ‘reactivates’ the oral elements in Shakespeare.46 This is one way to recognise Plaatje’s contribution to Shakespeare, without privileging Shakespeare as the signifier of a culture and a process of acculturation to which Plaatje was subjected. Instead, in Seddon’s reading, Shakespeare is equally subjected to Plaatje. This reading recognises Plaatje’s agency and creativity.
Plaatje was interdiscursive in other, non-literary ways as well. As a global traveller in political campaigns, Plaatje was part of the multinational group of colonial elites who influenced one another’s nationalist identities and agendas.47 While this international colonial resistance has been shown by Boehmer to characterise and influence the development of profoundly national anti-colonial struggles, it foreshadows modern globalised formations. As much as he was a man of his times, Plaatje was also a coconut for being ‘a forerunner, a harbinger of the … transnational networking which … has distinguished late twentieth-century South African culture in particular’.48
There are other ways in which Plaatje’s coconuttiness presaged some of our current issues. Boehmer maps the complexities of Plaatje’s identifications – as a spokesman for ‘his people’ and a member of the petit-bourgeois educated elite, as a loyal subject of Britain and of the Empire, as a self-consciously ‘civilised’ black man, and as a tireless critic and skilled satirist of the hypocrisies and limitations of his white rulers.49 Boehmer characterises Plaatje’s multifaceted, paradoxical self-positioning as ‘that overdetermined Janus ability to face in at least two if not several directions at once’.50 His multilingualism, as much as his role as cultural and linguistic translator in the permanent contact zone that was his life and milieu, made him emblematic of a South African possible way of being – always bearing in mind the class, if no longer gender, elitism of this position, its reliance on educational opportunities and the social flexibility they bring. Boehmer also suggests that in his writing style he instantiated the racial inseparability for which he so fervently campaigned all his working life.51
Finally, Plaatje is a coconut because of his association with Shakespeare, that ultimate signifier of fluency in English and of Englishness. He has been appreciated as a potential South African Shakespeare.52 He has also been seen as a representative of the emerging petit-bourgeois African class whose love of Shakespeare becomes a delineating marker of education and civility, and he has been both praised and criticised accordingly.53
Plaatje and Shakespeare
Plaatje makes multiple and repeated use of Shakespeare across his oeuvre of political and creative writing, as well as in his linguistic activism. For example, his novel Mhudi (first published in 1930), which was in part an engagement with the increasingly oppressive legal situation in general, and land politics in particular, draws on Shakespeare thematically and stylistically.54 He also quotes King Lear in Native Life in South Africa in order to authorise his rage and despair at the effects of the 1913 Land Act.55 Furthermore, in his introduction to Diphosophoso, his Setswana translation of A Comedy of Errors, Plaatje says that he translates Shakespeare in order to prove Setswana’s worth and thus attempt to ensure its survival; he is clearly invoking Shakespeare’s status as the best English can do to demand equal respect for a language fast being transformed by colonial and missionary intervention.
To illustrate the creativity of coconuttiness as well as its multiple simultaneous positionalities, I use as an example here what Plaatje does with and to Shakespeare in his contribution to Isaac Gollancz’s A Book of Homage to Shakespeare (1916). Gollancz’s edited text, assembled for the 1916 tercentenary celebrations of Shakespeare’s life, was an extraordinary work of colonial writing. Coppelia Kahn has shown how, as it drew together contributions from within and across the Empire in the name of Shakespeare as the signifier of English and Englishness itself, the collection allowed for the cultural performance of an idealised, reified Englishness and a counter-performance from national Others which undermined this project: ‘The poet of Englishness, readily available to any imperial subject educated in “the English-speaking tradition”, is blithely enlisted in support of agendas to unseat that very tradition.’56 This is done by activating the paradoxical meaning of Shakespeare as at once quintessentially English and the embodiment of human universality. This ideological project – to make Englishness at once specific and universal – is part of the core work of Empire, Khan suggests. She shows how the presence of imperial voices in the Book of Homage was enlisted to confirm the universality of Shakespeare and thus of Englishness, and, in the logic of the universal Bard, of Englishness and thus of Shakespeare. But she also shows how the colonies had other ideas, as the colonies always do. She discusses the ways a number of contributers, Plaatje among them, make use of Shakespeare’s signification to assert their own political points, thus ensuring they ‘re-envision Shakespeare, dismantling his links to England and to empire’.57
Kahn focuses on Plaatje’s linguistic activism for Setswana, arguing that here, as I have suggested above he did elsewhere, ‘Plaatje respectfully engages Shakespeare in the project of preserving and/or reinventing his own culture’.58 Kahn discusses the way Plaatje claims Shakespeare’s texts for African cultural expressions,
the forms customary and useful in Setswana culture … Thus his tribute to Shakespeare serves not ‘the English speaking tradition’, but rather his own tradition, placed in danger of extinction precisely because of British imperialism, which at the same time provides Plaatje with some of the implements for its tenuous preservation.59
An example of this double-edged Shakespeare can be found in Plaatje’s insistence that the deaths of ‘King Edward VII and two great Bechuana Chiefs – Sebele and Bathoeng’ could be equally marked by a quotation from Shakespeare.60 Equally, his concluding sentence to his contribution to the Book of Homage stresses ‘that some of the stories on which [Shakespeare’s] dramas are based find equivalents in African folk-lore’.61 This is the best illustration, under the circumstances, of the universal quality of African culture, and hence evidence that it is not Other, inferior, barbaric, or in need of alteration.
Seddon argues that we need to ‘extend’ this focus on how Plaatje used Shakespeare, to look in more detail at how he interdiscursively navigated his native orality, and the acts of translation in which he was engaged as a cultural and political activist. By circulating and performing orality in print, making use of the creative and political potentials in Shakespeare’s texts in multiple ways, ‘Plaatje’s work sought to create and circulate alternative combinations of tradition and modernity within his own political and cultural context’.62 Thus Plaatje can be read not only as invoking Shakespeare’s status in the Book of Homage to counter racism and to make a claim for the equal humanity of Africans. His invocation of Shakespeare in this collection also functions to construct what I am calling a coconut consciousness, in the name of demonstrating the full complexity of what it meant to be an African, and an African subject of Empire.