cannot, according to the logic of my argument, call it an authentic identity, since the language of authenticity has been too often invoked in the names of a putatively pure Africanness or a whiteness in need of protection from contamination. But I am suggesting that the messy in-betweenness, the mixed-up inside-outsideness of the coconut trope may be a more accurate descriptor of what some South African subjectivities have always been, since the region first encountered English. Ultimately, I argue, what we in post-apartheid South Africa need to leave behind are precisely those colonial and apartheid binaries which fail to describe who and what we – that complex, fractured, differential South African citizenry – are and, more importantly, who and what we can be.
Who are ‘we’?
‘We’ is a tenuously created category, stitched together with deep ambivalences of signification. May ‘we’ at least remember that, if nothing else.9
In the course of this book I will refer to ‘us’, South Africans. Given the diversity of people’s experiences of nationhood and citizenship and the vast discrepancies in access to services, living and working conditions, and other class-, race-, and gender-inflected differences of experience in this country, it is important to specify that the ‘we’ to which I refer cannot be taken to mean all South Africans. Indeed, the history of access to literacy in English in this country, and particularly to exposure to canonical English Literature taught in the traditional way, has always been class-inflected for most South Africans. Those with access to mission-school education, in colonial times, were by and large the ones who became writers in English. Under apartheid, Bantu Education inflected English Literature teaching very differently for most black South Africans. So in the first place, ‘we’ are those South Africans of a limited range of classes and literacies that enabled us to encounter English, Eng Lit, and Shakespeare, in ways which made it possible to enjoy and sometimes own the literature, and to profit from fluency in English.
Secondly, although most white South Africans will not have a personal identity investment in the idea of African tradition or reclaimed Africanness (although some do – presumably those who have been called to become sangomas, for example, have at least partial access to a personal sense of African tradition), many of us are invested in the discussions about Africanness. From commercial and tourist performances10 to nationalist constructions, to contestations over who qualifies as an African (after centuries of disavowal, many whites are now anxious to claim an African identity of sorts), personal identities with regard to Africa and Africanness are helping to form and formulate post-apartheid identity in general. ‘We’ can then be South Africans of any of the ‘races’ who have encountered Shakespeare via institutions which disseminate Eng Lit, with all the access, and subjection, to systemic power (gendered, social, economic, and, eventually, political) this implies.
‘We’ also exist in a time and space variously called post- or neo-colonial, and/or post- or neo-apartheid. These designations are not uncontested. It is true they are politically simplistic given, not least, the diversity of experiences of the past and present in this country that makes a definition of who ‘we’ are necessary in the first place. Different South Africans also have very different future possibilities from one another; if we are all post- anything, some of us are more post- than others, and many of us are differently post- from one another. Nevertheless, in the course of this book, I will use these terms because they are a convenient shorthand: I use post-colonial and post-apartheid mainly as historical markers, although post-colonial also refers to a body of work or an approach in the academy. Neo-colonial and neo-apartheid are used when I want to acknowledge that the inheritances of colonialism and apartheid are still with us, that these historical events have shaped the present in ways that make the moniker ‘post-’ optimistic. After all, the fact of this book, an engagement with Shakespeare in South Africa, is evidence of the neo-colonial reality in which we live as post-apartheid South Africans.
CHAPTER 1
Shakespeare in English, English in South Africa
In her 2007 European Union Literary Award-winning first novel, Kopana Matlwa presents an engaged critique of the primacy of English in the ‘new’ South Africa. Coconut is the story of two young women, Ofilwe and Fikile. The former is part of the emerging black middle class, and has ‘lost’ her culture for an Englished identity in a world of ‘white’ privilege that will never truly accept or know her. Eating with her family at an otherwise whites-only restaurant, she thinks,
We dare not eat with our naked fingertips, walk in generous groups, speak merrily in booming voices … They will scold us if we dare, not with their lips … because the laws prevent them from doing so, but with their eyes. They will shout, ‘Stop acting black!’ 1
The latter is desperate to acquire the glamour and power of whiteness in order to escape the poverty and deprivation she sees as intrinsically ‘black’:
‘And you, Fikile, what do you want to be when you grow up?’
‘White, teacher Zola. I want to be white.’ …
‘But Fikile dea r… why would you want to do that … ?’
‘Because it’s better.’
‘What makes you think that, Fikile?’
‘Everything.’ 2
Part of acquiring whiteness and the class advancement that goes with it is acquiring English, and with it an implictly Anglo-American culture which is relentlessly ‘white’. This is Ofilwe’s ironic ABC:
After-Sun. Bikini. Ballet. Barbie and Ken. Cruise. Disneyland. Disco. Diamonds and Pearls. Easter Egg. Fettucine. Frappe. Fork and Knife. Gymnastics. Horse Riding. Horticulture. House in the Hills. Indoor Cricket. Jungle Gym. Jacuzzi. Jumping Jacks and Flip Flacks. Khaki. Lock. Loiter. Looks like Trouble. Maid. Native. Nameless.
No, not me, Madam. Napoleon. Ocean. Overthrow. Occupy and Rule. Palace. Quantity. Quantify. Queen of England. Red. Sunscreen. Suntan. Sex on the Beach. Tinkerbell. Unicorn. Oopsy daisy. Unwrap them all at once! Video Games. World Wide Web. Wireless Connection. Xmas. Yo-yo Diet. You, You and You. Zero guilt. 3
Matlwa’s novel is an attack on ongoing systemic racism and its links to what the book sees as the power bloc that is whiteness and Englishness: the two are inseparable. Thinking of her cousins in the townships, whose parents did not advance economically and who did not have access to the education she was given, Ofilwe says:
I spoke the TV language; the one Daddy spoke at work, the one Mama never could get right, the one that spoke of sweet success.
How can I possibly listen to those who try to convince me otherwise? What has Sepedi ever done for them? Look at those sorrowful cousins of mine who think that a brick is a toy. Look at me. Even the old people know I am special…. They smile at me and say, ‘You, our child, must save all your strength for your books.’ Do you see, I always tell my cousins, that they must not despair, as soon as my schooling is over I will come back and teach them English and then they will be special too? 4
Shakespeare has a small but significant cameo role in the book, as the rhetorical trappings in the speech and subjectivity of an emasculated, abusive, poor, black man with a useless English education. Unlike Ofilwe’s English, which makes her special, Uncle’s Shakespearean English just makes him exploitable and, in Fikile’s words, pathetic.
