within universities around the world, academics have been arguing for the last thirty years that Shakespeare’s putative universal relevance is a creation of a colonial system which sought to entrench the culture of the coloniser and that Shakespeare’s cultural solidity and textual stability are constructions of his editors in the first instance. Chapter two examines some of the ways the connections between ‘Shakespeare’ and a generalised ‘Africa’ have tended to be made. I argue that looking to claim the universal Shakespeare for this version of ‘Africa’ is indeed a reinscribing of a patronising dynamic which relies on a binary understanding of race and a problematic understanding of ‘African’ culture.
This construction of the relationship between Shakespeare and a version of Africanness in South Africa sets the tone for exploring other ways Shakespeare has been invoked since liberation to reinscribe the very values we should be moving away from. In chapter three I trace another instance of Shakespeare’s incarnation as the epitome of an Englishness that is positioned against a constructed South Africanness, this time a ‘white’ South Africanness. In acclaimed expatriate actor Antony Sher’s charting of his experience of staging Titus Andronicus in newly post-apartheid South Africa, I argue, the same old colonising dynamics are at work. Sher, I suggest, is an example of coconuttiness too – the old kind. His is a presentation of South Africanness as a veneer, and it relies on the binary logic of the traditional idea of the coconut.
In chapter four I explore another of the ways the universal Shakespeare is still very much in evidence in post-apartheid South Africa, in the arena where most of us who will do so, will encounter his texts – school. This suggests that the rich South African Shakespearean tradition exemplified by Plaatje’s work (but including a host of other writers, mostly but not exclusively in English) is not being recognised or disseminated.
One of the many ironies of post-apartheid South Africa is the fact that this problematically universal Shakespeare animated a programme of African renewal. In chapter five I argue for recognising the relationship between the African Renaissance and Eng Lit (by which I mean to designate English Literature as a formal field of study), and therefore the inheritances of English for South Africa, specifically in its implications for those of us in the economic and linguistic elite of the country. The African Renaissance, which depends in part on what Shakespeare has come to stand for in the neo-colonial world, uses this dependency to argue for a traditional Africanness. In its complex and contradictory cultural work, the concept of the African Renaissance makes clear that our post-colonial and post-apartheid present is constituted by loss and fracture. We must own this starting point, which goes right back to Plaatje, in order to explore our possibilities for the future, or we will remain stuck in the logic of our terrible past.
The African Renaissance was Thabo Mbeki’s baby, and it is no coincidence that this most eruditely self-fashioned of presidents was saturated with Shakespeare in his public persona. In the final chapter, I suggest that post-Polokwane and Mbeki’s spectacular fall from power, the familiar version of high-cultural Shakespeare now definitely stands for something un-South-African in the popular imagination. In the colonial and apartheid past, Shakespeare stood for empowerment in a socio-economic system dominated by ‘white’ culture. To know your Shakespeare was to contest your positioning as a ‘native’. Recently, however, Shakespeare seems to have come to stand for something else. The changed meaning of Shakespeare is related to the charged meaning of English, as a language and as a coconut identity in post-apartheid South Africa. As material inequalities continue to worsen, and as English remains the necessary pathway to economic advancement even as our education system deteriorates, the coconut becomes a figure of privilege increasingly accused of rejecting and so betraying his or her African roots.
Reclaiming the coconut
In an article published in 2007, the same year as Kopano Matlwa’s novel Coconut won the European Union Literary Award, Andile Mngxitama calls a new generation of ‘influential young people … neither black nor white’.8 Although they constitute a numerical minority, he says, ‘they are a cultural majority’. Mngxitama accuses this generation of Africans of being agents of colonialism along the lines of Fanon’s mimic men, ‘“black outside and white inside”’. He descries their lack of interest in their own history, and accuses them of being ‘agents of whiteness’ who will inherit the new South Africa and set the terms for a denigration of blackness, including black languages. While the political imperatives underlying this critique remain important – the production of an economic elite when poverty remains a dire issue, the lack of support for indigenous African languages, the youth’s relationship of disavowal to the country’s racialised history which allows inherited structures to perpetuate unchallenged – what I wish to refute in this book is the binary logic which continues to structure public discourse about who and what South Africans can and should be in relation to each other. Characterising this emerging elite as ‘white’ on the ‘inside’ reproduces a version of culture as capable of being authentically or inauthentically African, a version which is currently being deployed by the very political leaders who continue to let us down. It is also ignorant of the history Mngxitama wishes our youngsters would own. Perhaps if we begin to teach a version of South Africanness that is fundamentally coconutty, we can recapture the interest of the generation emerging as inheritors of that particular history. And I mean by this to remake the idea or reclaim the image of the coconut: Mngxitama invokes the commonsensical notion that a coconut is made of an outside and a differently ‘coloured’ inside.
My reclamation of the term is, of course, in part ironic and provocative. The coconut is useful as a psychologically loaded symbol, one which encodes racial histories and identity struggles. In arguing for using the icon anew, I am suggesting that its logic of outside and inside be refused, and that instead we celebrate what the charge of coconuttiness is trying to name in its derogatory way. As I will keep reiterating, I am not simultaneously arguing for a version of history which denies the oppression that was perpetuated in the name of racism, or the suffering that black people had to endure because they were black. That racialised past, and its consequences, are very much with us today. But I am arguing that there is also a version of South Africanness that has always existed, which cannot be captured by a binary logic, and which may be very productive of a way forward for our national imaginary. Because it is rooted in history, it is not like the anodyne rainbow nationhood that Mngxitama rightly objects to.
I use Shakespeare to demonstrate the genesis of and potential in our reformulated coconut possibilities. That this reclaimed coconuttiness has tended not to make it to our public performances, textual or political, is evidence of the ongoing power of the colonial and apartheid binary logic in which one is either/or: either authentically African, or European; either a purified and nostalgic version of black, or white (on the inside, or otherwise). As I argue in the final chapter, the ongoing power of this binary is reflective of very real ongoing inequalities which tend to remain raced, and of the existence of inherited structures of white privilege within which all South Africans have to try to make it. But at the same time, I also want to point out the ways in which discourses of authentic blackness and traitorous whiteness are easy political tools, which deny aspects of our history and our identities for expedient and dangerous agendas. These range from a murderous homophobia to a violent misogyny, to a form of political smokescreening, where colonial history is rhetorically deployed by leaders whose corrupt practices ensure they benefit from the system, the exploitative qualities of which they lay at the feet of white people.
Ultimately, I hope to make it clear that Shakespeare’s cultural value is, in our context, a complex signifier. While in the course of the arguments made here I do argue for some of the implications of the fact that English Literature as a discipline, and Shakespeare as one of its foundational figures, are both colonial imports developed to be colonising tools, I am not suggesting that Shakespeare therefore has no place in post-apartheid South Africa. I invoke the idea of the coconut, not to endorse its reductive and contained notions of race and identity, but to challenge those ideas and to reclaim the image of the black person worked on by history through English. Perhaps some South Africans have always been coconuts – that is, have internalised
