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.
David Schalkwyk comments on the complexities of Plaatje’s modes of address to his different audiences, and how this is reflected in his use of pronouns.63 Here is an example from the Book of Homage, where Plaatje compares Shakespeare’s plays to the racist messages conveyed in contemporary films, one of them made by the Ku Klux Klan:
Shakespeare’s dramas, on the other hand, show that nobility and valor, like depravity and cowardice, are not the monopoly of any color. Shakespeare lived over 300 years ago, but he appears to have had a keen grasp of human character. His description of things seems so inwardly correct that (in spite of our rapid means of communication and facilities for traveling) we of the present age have not yet equaled his acumen.64
Plaatje, writing in London, speaks to an English audience when he denotes himself and his audience as ‘we of the present age’. In speaking in English, of Shakespeare, Plaatje demonstrates that he shares with his audience an appreciation of Shakespeare as well as a modern cosmopolitanism. Plaatje has claimed the language and its most famous son as his own, and in living that identity, in the act of writing, he self-consciously also counters typical colonial charges against African subjects of Empire, of barbarism or backwardness. At the same time, Plaatje’s allusion to the inwardly incorrect nature of ‘the present age’, ‘in spite of our rapid means of communication and … traveling’, allows him to critique the ignorance implicit in the racism in the films to which he refers. He also implicitly invokes Shakespeare’s putative universally human status to endorse this judgement.
In all this, we see how Plaatje used Shakespeare to make a claim for his, and his people’s, already-proven inclusion in the realm of imperial citizenry and the modernity it claimed to stand for. This claim is indeed Janus-faced: in claiming space in imperial universality, Plaatje simultaneously deployed Shakespeare as ‘a useful instrument with which to sustain his own culture, language, and political identity’.65
But Plaatje does not just have Shakespeare to use as a tool. Plaatje relates an anecdote of how Shakespeare’s English functioned as the language of love between himself and his wife-to-be (they both read Romeo and Juliet, he goes on to say, since their cultural situation mimicked the play’s):
While reading Cymbeline, I met the girl who afterwards became my wife. I was not then as well acquainted with her language – the Xhosa – as I am now; and although she had a better grip of mine – the Sechuana – I was doubtful whether I could make her understand my innermost feelings in it, so in coming to an understanding we both used the language of educated people – the language which Shakespeare wrote – which happened to be the only official language of our country at the time.66
If this is allowed to be not just the chance for him to make a political point about English rule and the responsibilities that should implictly come with that status towards such obviously Anglo-identified subjects, but also the record of a moment of intimacy and connection not only through but with a literary text, Shakespeare is clearly not just a tool. ‘His’ texts, their literary power, their putatively universal messages have been interpolated and owned, claimed.
Plaatje and the others that followed him were Englished subjects, subjects of and in English. But not in a slavish or solely colonised sense, pace Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s formulation. Reading Plaatje positively as a coconut is a way to take seriously the elite colonial subjectivity he can be made to represent. His paradoxical stance becomes the picture not of the ventriloquising subaltern, able only to mimic, however subversively. Taking Plaatje’s coconuttiness seriously is a way to see him and the men of his class as far more complex than simply positioned in relation to the colonisers who may have had a lot to do with determining the terms of possibility for them, but certainly did not control their responses, much as they may have tried. Plaatje, and the coconuts who follow, born into the cultural, political, and social ‘Situation’ which was and is South Africa following on from Plaatje’s time, were legitimate African subjects.
Indeed, Plaatje’s coconuttiness could be said to exemplify the way identity functions, especially in as complex a space as post-apartheid South Africa:
A subjectivity such as his, inhabiting a place of difference so clearly constructed for it and aspiring in every way to counter the fixed conceptions attached to it, can only be aware of the provisional nature of identity, especially as it is developed within cross-cultural representations.67
The
