commentary on why colonial binaries like the West/Africa, or English/indigenous languages, or Shakespeare/indigenous cultures do not adequately describe who we are. I am not saying that Shakespeare’s universality made ‘him’ available to Plaatje or other South Africans. As should be clear by now, I am suspicious of the politics of universality. Neither am I suggesting that Shakespeare was a colonising force whose influence created coconuts in the original sense. Although Shakespeare can be said to be an agent of coconuttiness from the beginning, in that the texts and their symbolic weight influenced the writing styles and psyches of some South Africans from within an education system that affected their personal subjectivities, these first coconuts should be seen to stand for an aspect of our history we can value. I want to show how, as an instance of one kind of South Africanness, our history both reveals the immense and significant investments of all kinds in the construction of the figure of Shakespeare, and also demonstrates why we cannot simply dismiss ‘him’ as a Western, colonial import. But first: why Shakespeare? Why is Shakespeare the gold standard of English Literature and Literariness?
Shakespeare in/and English
English as a subject has its own disciplinary history. Within the field of study that is English Literature, or what I will often designate Eng Lit, Shakespeare occupies a special place because of ‘his’ canonicity. Why Shakespeare became ‘Shakespeare’ in this context, why it was this particular writer whose texts came to stand for all that Eng Lit is and should be, is an ongoing question whose answer very much depends on your ideological positioning for or against the idea of literature as transcendental and apolitical.
As part of its development as a discipline, English Literature was fundamentally concerned to find ways to identify and evaluate the highest, best expressions of what it means to be human. Whether the origins of the discipline are considered to be in the emergence of the humanities from the study of rhetoric and from the European culture wars of the eighteenth century, in Matthew Arnold’s nineteenth-century educational interventions, in colonial education practices, or in the professionalisation of the subject in the early twentieth century, Eng Lit has been developed around a concern to identify and evaluate ‘the best’ written cultural expressions of human life, even if those criteria have since been radically expanded.14
However, as a number of critics have pointed out, the project of developing a canon of the best literature in English was always implicated in a complex political field that it disavowed for a long time. For example, a collection of essays edited by Peter Widdowson sketched the discipline’s various ideological and material constituting factors; Gauri Viswanathan has detailed the colonial politics behind the development of the formal study of Eng Lit; Terry Eagleton has argued that its institutionalisation was informed by a nostalgic, conservative ideological programme, and one deeply implicated in class and gender politics. More recently, Neil Rhodes has also argued for the imbrications of gender and class politics in the development of English Studies, from as far back as the Renaissance.15
In Shakespeare Studies in particular, the universal Shakespeare which is one of the cornerstones of the discipline came under fire for being classed, raced, and gendered. Furthermore, ‘his’ supposed apolitical universality was revealed to be ideologically complicit with the oppressive bourgeois practices of the state.16 Shakespeare’s putative universality was interrogated in material terms, and responsible historical accounts attempted to trace the process through which ‘his’ reputation was accrued, instead of assuming its self-perpetuating and self-evident nature.17 It is these investigations which have made possible the challenge to the universal Shakespeare as self-evidently the best human culture has to offer, when that apparently universal human culture happens to belong to a specific time and place and does not, in fact, speak equally or equally easily to all humans.
Despite these academic ‘discoveries’, Shakespeare retains ‘his’ place in popular culture as the marker of high human culture.18 In a South African context, this positionality has been used to invoke a range of references, resonances, and self-fashionings, as the rest of this book illustrates. For now, the point I wish to stress is that despite a history which clearly demonstrates a vexed, complex, ambivalent, contradictory position for Shakespeare in our region, and from there for the Englishness ‘he’ has come to stand for, Shakespeare keeps coming up as a signifier of a binary relation. This relation is more or less overtly raced and classed, depending on the situation.
That Shakespeare keeps standing for something else – culture, whiteness, literature (implicitly English) – is clear in the commotion which followed a group of teachers’ suggestion to the Gauteng Education Department in 2001 that certain Shakespeare plays be banned from school syllabi. Plays earmarked for removal included Anthony and Cleopatra and Othello (for being racist), Julius Caesar (‘because it elevates men’), and King Lear (for being ‘full of violence and despair’).19 These teachers were clearly motivated by some sort of awareness of the findings of the work outlined above, and trying to be responsible about the ideological power of Shakespeare and the messages being transmitted through education. But both the attack on the Shakespearean texts, and the responses in the press, spoke to a host of other anxieties underlying what this literature stood for in people’s minds.20 This is not to deny that any discussion of the details, role, or purpose of English literary studies in post-apartheid South Africa must take cognisance of the debates about Shakespeare as an agent of various kinds of colonisation, as well as the debates about colonising languages in neo-colonial situations.21 Shakespeare, as the icon of Eng Lit and of a particular kind of cultured Englishness, remains a potent signifier of what English stands for in South Africa, even if what exactly that is, is variable depending on the times and the person or community.
English in South Africa
If there is a lingua franca in South Africa, it is Zulu.22 But English is the language of power – the means to social and economic advancement – as it was in the days of the mission schools. From the early 1840s, missionaries facilitated the first printed vernacular texts. These were all religious. However, South Africans wrote Christian texts not only because they were converts: as colonisation impacted on the existing social, political, and economic structures, Christianity and an education in English and the Englishness it transmitted were the means to succeed in the new system.23 In post-apartheid South Africa, English remains the language it is necessary to know in order to advance economically and politically, and so socially.24
Despite never having been the most-spoken language, in other words, English was the most powerful language during the development of formal education in the region, and the social changes this system helped to effect. Leon de Kock points to the inescapable multiple violences of this history when he says:
[T]he orthodoxy of English as a dominant medium of educational discourse in South Africa, and the institutionalisation of this discourse (by which English ‘literature’ is privileged as an area of study), was won by blood … the ascendancy of English as a principal medium for social empowerment among many black South Africans was secured in the nineteenth century on frontier battlefields by colonial soldiers.25
The supremacy of English within the educated elite carried through into the formation of the liberation movement, whose leaders were from this elite. With the passing of the Bantu Education Act in 1953 as part of the formalisation of apartheid, the mission schools were effectively closed during the 1950s. The Bantu Education Act was designed to terminate access to the social and economic mobility enabled by a mission-school education because of the threat this educated class fraction posed, as a source of leadership, and to the increasingly white-protectionist labour market. It is from this fraction that the ANC was born, and thus from which the upper echelons of the current political ruling class in South Africa have emerged, at least until the presidency of Jacob Zuma (this change is significant for my final conclusions about the symbolic status Shakespeare now occupies in the South African public sphere).
English
