they were and as they remain, produced subjects who can never return to a place of imagined pure Africanness, if indeed such a place ever truly existed. Instead, for those of us able to occupy the elite space of even relative economic stability, coconuttiness can be the marker of a constituting interdiscursivity which is as African as the history of South Africa itself. Like Plaatje’s Shakespeare, the African coconut is both/and, both Englished and transforming of Englishness. And this is a legitimate South African identity.
English in South Africa, Shakespeare in South Africa
There is no intrinsic reason why Shakespeare’s texts should be made to speak to South African issues outside of the inheritances of the colonial system which entrenched Shakespeare as the paragon of literature. At the same time, there is an African Shakespearean tradition which exists in our history, which begins with Plaatje, and which is absent from most South Africans’ experiences of what Shakespeare can and does mean. This is clear in Matlwa’s novel, where the weak and emasculated Uncle stands for what the educated Englished black man can become in post-apartheid South Africa. This is a sharp comment on the figure of the earlier, mission-educated young man, who was meant to be groomed as a leader of ‘his people’, and was skilled to navigate the new system on their behalf:
Uncle just came home after his first semester at the University of Cape Town with a letter of exclusion from the medical school in his bookbag … He lay in bed for weeks sobbing … and that was the end of Uncle the smart one, the one who spoke the white man’s language, the one who would save us. 68
For Matlwa, an educated woman writing in English about the benefits and costs of being an Englished African subject today, the figure of a constructed leader of ‘his people’ spouting Shakespeare is an aspirant doomed to fail in a corrupt and hypocritical system. This post-apartheid critique echoes the kinds of criticisms levelled against the men of Plaatje’s ilk by a later generation of angry youth less willing to play the civil game in the face of politics in twentieth-century South Africa.69 As I go on to argue in the last chapter, which looks in more detail at Coconut, self-delusional Uncle might be what the Shakespearised coconut has become in post-apartheid South Africa. If, for Plaatje, Shakespeare was the embodiment of what Engish had to offer, in our times Shakespeare may be the embodiment of its empty promises. Given this move towards binary meanings, it remains important to remember that the subject of English – the language, the literature, and the figure of the South African made by and in English(ed) systems of power – becomes evidence for the actual complexity of the apparently oppositional positions English is increasingly invoked to endorse in the current political climate.
The history of Shakespeare in South Africa encapsulates the complex regional history of complicities, contestations, reclamations, and resistances which comprise the true meaning of the coconut. Material privilege, aspiration, identity politics, and race politics all adhere in messy and complicated ways to ‘English’ and to ‘Shakespeare’, as indeed they always have.
The chapters that follow demonstrate this complex, contradictory subject by offering case studies of what Shakespeare has been to, and for, a range of South African subject positions. It becomes clear how often ‘he’ is invoked to shore up an identity binary which draws its power from the privilege which (still) accrues to English and to the whiteness with which it is associated. This is one of Matlwa’s points in Coconut. At the same time, as I have been arguing, the presence of a genuinely South African ownership of Shakespeare – complex, complicit, contradictory as this is – as seen in the work of Plaatje, for example, demonstrates the artificiality of this binary, and exposes discourses of African authenticity as artificial and impossibly nostalgic. It demonstrates the true melange which is by now a paradoxically ‘authentic’ South Africanness. That Shakespeare tends not to be invoked in this context in South Africa is a lesson not only in the politics of exclusion and social and personal power plays in the region. It is also evidence of what it is that still animates the symbolic power of ‘Shakespeare’ and the history of overpowering to which that symbol of English belongs.
CHAPTER 2
‘Through Shakespeare’s Africa’: ‘Terror and murder’?
In South Africa, the desire to make connections between Shakespeare’s time and a contemporary local reality has a history that goes back to, at least, the work of Solomon Plaatje in the early twentieth century. The apparent parallels between the conditions of life in South Africa and Elizabethan England generated comment also in the 1950s, the 1980s, and post-apartheid in the 1990s. This chapter will discuss some of the different motivations for, and effects of, making a connection between South Africa and Shakespeare’s England.
There are at least two ways in which such a comparison functions. On the one hand, as Plaatje’s oeuvre demonstrates, and as the writing of the Drum staffers discussed below indicates, pointing to a connection between Shakespeare and Africanness can authorise the human and political ‘relevance’ and worth of African experience. On the other hand, as the reference later in this chapter to Antony Sher and Gregory Doran’s production of Titus Andronicus in post-apartheid South Africa seeks to point out, the need to find connections between the two times and places can indicate a problematic understanding of relevance, the ideological implications of which belie the attempt at recognition encoded in the act of comparison.1
The question of relevance encodes specific strategies of identification that reveal the workings of cultural politics, and not of a literary universality. Shakespeare is not uniquely ‘relevant’ to South Africa because ‘his’ works offer us life lessons we cannot do without, or cannot access in other ways. As explored in chapter 1, Shakespeare is ‘relevant’ because of the role ‘he’ has played in the development of writing in English in the region, and the links between this cultural history and the political and psychic histories of South Africa. As such, Shakespeare has a meaning and a presence here that exceeds, even as it arises out of, colonial constructions of cultural worth. Shakespeare is also ‘relevant’ to South Africa because all culture belongs to everyone. Nevertheless, we need to continue to be cognisant of the politics of the desire for Shakespearean relevance. As I will argue in this chapter, making connections between Shakespeare and South Africa can function in a range of ways.
If Shakespeare informs what it means to be a coconut through what ‘he’ stands for as an icon of Englishness, of universal culture, of privilege, then ‘his’ value as an authorising force and a figure of identification can be as fraught as the identity of the coconut itself. Given – or in spite of – ‘his’ fraught history, how important is Shakespeare to the ‘new’ South Africa, and hence to our emerging cultural formations? Matlwa’s novel suggests ‘he’ is worthless, that the mission-school history from which ‘he’ emerged has taken us to a place of post-apartheid cultural dispossession. Coconut’s coconuts are deprived and cheated by what Shakespeare stands for, not enriched by it. But Shakespeare’s coconuttiness has a more complex applicability. The racial and class politics of this applicability pull in different directions depending on the moment in South African history when they are activated, and by whom.
‘Watching an Elizabethan play’: Drum’s Shakespeare
Englishman Anthony Sampson was editor of the famous Drum magazine, which, in the 1950s, developed into a forum for expressing the experiences and constructing the identities of men and women living in the urban slum community of Sophiatown in Johannesburg.2 In the process, Drum established the careers of a group of writers who developed the short story and the autobiography as key South African genres, before and during the time that most of them went into exile following amendments to the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act. Sampson made numerous comparisons between Elizabethan England and the ghettos of Johannesburg, in order to explain the quality of the lifestyles he saw there. This analogy
