colonialism. It was also useful during apartheid. Es’kia Mphahlele, one of our finest writers in English from the mission-educated generations, has written about the ways in which English functioned as a language of resistance during apartheid.26 He also spoke about the personal gains brought by a fluency in English as the language and the culture that helped to shape the boys who attended the mission schools: ‘English which was not our mother tongue, gave us power, power to master the external world which came to us through it.’27 If English has always been a language of personal power as well as an aspirational language, its status as such was exacerbated by apartheid policies of ‘retribalisation’ and by Bantu Education, which made it clear that education in the venacular was intended to be second-rate.28
Another reason English enjoyed its status as the language of resistance under apartheid was the (now problematised) position of Afrikaans as the language of the oppressor. As the language of the educated, English is implicated in class hierarchies which are more important now than they were under apartheid, when the exigencies of Struggle called for the sublimation of differences among the oppressed. In post-apartheid South Africa, as Graham Pechey points out, ‘[f]luency in English is virtually synonymous with literacy’,29 which means with class advantage. Coconut ends up despairing of this fact, as it concludes with the words of a clearly good man whom Fikile meets on the train, and who talks about watching his daughter on the playground at her elite school. At first he acknowledges the integration that an education in English has enabled:
And then suddenly a little chocolate girl walks past me, hand in hand with the cutest half-metre milk bar I have ever seen in my life. Both of them are chatting away … He smiles at the memory. Wow! I thought, look how happy they are.
But then he goes on:
They were so joyful, those kids. But, you know, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were only happy because they didn’t know. Don’t get me wrong, the school is remarkable, it really is … [J]ust by looking at Palesa, you can just see that she is such an inspired little girl with so much to offer the world. Compared to other children her age in the township, who go to black schools, she is miles ahead … But, I can’t shake a certain feeling … [L]istening to all those little black faces yelping away in English … just broke my heart … Standing at the edge of that playground, I watched little spots of amber and auburn become less of what Africa dreamed of and more of what Europe thought we ought to be.30
Palesa’s father could be describing a child at a colonial mission school when he speaks of the ‘opportunities those children get at that school’,31 and the way her education positions her as someone with ‘so much to offer the world’, specifically because it equips her with a fluency in English and an acculturation to the dominant ideological system. Of course, notable again is that the coconuts in this book are all female, with the exception of the failed coconut, Fikile’s uncle. This is one change which marks progress of a sort from then till now: opportunities are available to some girls as well as to their brothers. However, Matlwa is emphasising not the opportunity, but the cost of coconuttiness, in part by sliding back into the reified, binary positions exemplified by ‘Africa’ and ‘Europe’ in the mind of Palesa’s dad.
Scholars from a range of disciplines have examined the implications for elite South Africans of the hegemonic dominance of English. The mission school disseminated what Graham Duncan has called ‘coercive agency’:32 along with Christianity, the missions taught a colonial and colonising ideology which shaped their students even as the black South African men resisted and responded to the message that their cultures and languages were in need of improvement and replacement. Scholars of mission schools and their effects, and the early South African writers in English, all emphasise the ‘ambiguous qualification’33 which an education in English language and literary culture entailed. For example, in his autobiography Tell Freedom, Peter Abrahams, one of the first black South African writers to acquire an international career and the first to write an autobiography in English, details the effects of his mission-school education in pre-apartheid days. It gave him his vocation (specifically, he says, Shakespeare inspired in him the desire to write, and to become educated in English literature). It gave him a deep sense of justice and of a shared humanity through the Christian ideology he was taught. It also made the hypocrisies of South Africa in the world outside the schoolroom walls inescapably obvious and intolerable. And, as he goes on to chart in his life story, his education makes it impossible for him to return to his family and the community from which he came.34
As Abrahams suggests, the Englished South African subject has been described as split. While a postmodern understanding would see all subjectivity as split or fractured, and would understand this as unproblematic, the splitting effects of English have been repeatedly presented as fracturing a subject who would otherwise be authentically whole: in saving, English also spoils. Bloke Modisane writes bitterly of the experience of being a ‘Situation’, ‘the eternal alien between two worlds’35 as a result of his propensity for a cultured ‘white society’, membership of which was denied him by early apartheid legislation and attitudes. Duncan traces this split condition back to the mission schools, describing how Lovedale created ‘dislocated individuals and groups’, alienated from their societies of birth and also excluded from ‘the Western European lifestyle they aspired to’.36 But the Englished South African’s ‘Situation’ can be read as something other than the position of eternal exclusion, particularly if one is looking pre- and post-apartheid.
English has always played a more complex role in South African identities and societies than Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s famous explication allows. I do not wish to deny the region’s painful history of struggle, to celebrate its effects, or to blithely overlook the reality of ongoing relations of material and discursive power kept in place by the dominance of English resulting from this history. However, colonised subjects made use of colonial tools of oppression, often in order to construct themselves as resisting subjects, albeit with complications and complicities. This use implies a process that resulted not only in the cultural colonisation of the African mind, but also in African ownership of colonial texts, icons, and languages. It is a contradictory and traumatic process, with ramifications for identity on personal and cultural levels. But language can become a tool for the comprador speaker, because comprador identity, the access to the colonial world gained though language use, comes about not solely through the acquisition of the colonial language, but ‘through the act of speaking itself, the act of self-assertion involved in using the language of the colonizer’.37 The subject speaking English in South Africa will always be more than the sum of the colonial process; the forms taken by agency cannot be underestimated.38 If millions of Africans by now speak English, is English not an African language, one as deeply implicated in history as any other language – not universal, in other words, and not straightforwardly liberating, but ‘authentically’, contradictorily African? Like any other aspect of identity? Like the African coconut?
Solomon Plaatje: The first South African coconut
For elite African men at the turn of the century of high colonialism, English was a very important medium as well as a personal and artistic source of useful and sometimes enriching content. It was, as it remains, a means for socio-economic advancement. It was a mine of literary wealth, interesting for its own sake and for the messages about universal humanity conveyed through the teaching of Eng Lit. Deploying English and the literature that went with it was the means to publicly stake a claim to personhood in the terms of the ruling regime; it enabled a demonstration and provided a vocabulary that was meant to help in the fight against colonial patronage and its hardening racism. Leon de Kock has shown how and why African intellectuals seeking to forge a literary and human presence embraced English as a ‘universal’ and universalising language. He notes also the complexities and complicities of this position:
The writing of ‘literature’ in English was an uneasy negotiation: in its dense web of textuality were multiple constraints
