works of black South African writing in English attest to this unease in the very forms, idioms, and registers employed in writing for a readership that did not really exist in any significant numbers except as an imaginary community where English and the values it was held to represent approximated the ideals of civil egalitarianism … English was a discursive site riven with contradiction – offering entry to a larger world, a more global imaginary, but hedged by the constraints of a colonizing ideology.39
De Kock goes on to offer an argument for recognising the complexity of African identifications with British identity and Western acculturation, for taking seriously the desire to participate in and to own what these things offered and stood for: civility, modernity, Christian brotherhood, equality. He argues that the South African response to colonisation was never one of pure oppositionality; instead, African leaders used the discourses, ideas, and ideologies brought by the colonisers to demand inclusion into the civil imaginary and into state structures, and sought to counter racism by calling for the recognition of their ability to live up to all the terms designated by the colonisers as the marks of human development and ‘civilisation’.
Equally, Bhekizizwe Peterson has recently stressed how writing in English by African intelligentsia at the turn of the twentieth century was an act of self-assertion, a performance of African modernity: ‘The new African intelligentsia drew on their mastery of literacy and African orature in order to claim and defend their rights as modern citizens.’40 They engaged with British imperialism in the terms in which it presented itself to them: as a viable ally against Afrikaner nationalism. Nonetheless, they occupied a vexed position. As loyal citizens of Britain, they articulated a commitment to, and in so doing called upon, the liberal values being asserted in the name of Empire. At the same time they faced ongoing and worsening hardship as the hypocrisy of British liberal discourse regarding race in South Africa became increasingly clear. English became at once a resource in the fight for political rights and for the rights of indigenous cultures, a creolising force in personal identities and in cultural developments, a marker of acculturation and modernisation, a false promise … complex and contradictory indeed.41
We could reformulate these nuanced descriptions of the complexities of identification and performances at the time, as signifiers of a reformulated coconuttiness. This new definition reclaims the pejorative term as signifying a form of elite African modernity that is as much a ‘true’ part of African history, and Struggle history, as any other. We see all the markers of this coconuttiness in the work of Solomon Plaatje, and the double-edgedness of it in the progression of his life’s writing as it responded to the events he lived through.
Plaatje’s life story is by now well known; I will not rehearse it in detail here.42 Born in 1876, he was a man of extraordinary ability and range of activity. He was a founding member of the political organisation that would become the ANC, a leading journalist, a diarist and letterist, a linguist, a professional interpreter (he spoke nine languages), a ‘native’ ethnographer deeply rooted in his Barolong identity, a Christian, the first black South African novelist in English, and the first translator of Shakespeare in southern Africa. He also wrote political texts which are literary in their skill, and travelled internationally campaigning for the increasingly receding rights of black South Africans as the twentieth century began. He was largely self-educated and life-educated, coming of age in the cosmopolitan town of Kimberley,43 but he did have connections to the mission-school system. He grew up and was partially educated, until 1894, at the mission station at Pniel. He died in 1932, still fighting for the dwindling political and linguistic rights of black South Africans.
In terms of my argument, Plaatje is the archetypal coconut for a number of reasons. He was ‘[a]rguably the pre-eminent literary figure present at the moment of the first formation of South Africa as a single political entity’.44 This literary skill was manifest in both English and Setswana, and in his complex creations and translations between the two cultures, their literatures, and the forms those literatures took.
Indeed, Plaatje has been read as the first, and the most proficient, African writer in the acts of translation in all senses: ‘Plaatje was … literally, almost quintessentially, interdiscursive.’ This interdiscursivity includes the ways in which he incorporated orature into his writing, allowing African practices and values to interpenetrate with the English in which he was also highly skilled.45 As a result he created what is arguably a truly South African literary discourse, made up of both/and, not either/ or. For example, Deborah Seddon has written about Plaatje’s interdiscursive mediation between Setswana orality and Shakespeare, arguing that he ‘reactivates’ the oral elements in Shakespeare.46 This is one way to recognise Plaatje’s contribution to Shakespeare, without privileging Shakespeare as the signifier of a culture and a process of acculturation to which Plaatje was subjected. Instead, in Seddon’s reading, Shakespeare is equally subjected to Plaatje. This reading recognises Plaatje’s agency and creativity.
Plaatje was interdiscursive in other, non-literary ways as well. As a global traveller in political campaigns, Plaatje was part of the multinational group of colonial elites who influenced one another’s nationalist identities and agendas.47 While this international colonial resistance has been shown by Boehmer to characterise and influence the development of profoundly national anti-colonial struggles, it foreshadows modern globalised formations. As much as he was a man of his times, Plaatje was also a coconut for being ‘a forerunner, a harbinger of the … transnational networking which … has distinguished late twentieth-century South African culture in particular’.48
There are other ways in which Plaatje’s coconuttiness presaged some of our current issues. Boehmer maps the complexities of Plaatje’s identifications – as a spokesman for ‘his people’ and a member of the petit-bourgeois educated elite, as a loyal subject of Britain and of the Empire, as a self-consciously ‘civilised’ black man, and as a tireless critic and skilled satirist of the hypocrisies and limitations of his white rulers.49 Boehmer characterises Plaatje’s multifaceted, paradoxical self-positioning as ‘that overdetermined Janus ability to face in at least two if not several directions at once’.50 His multilingualism, as much as his role as cultural and linguistic translator in the permanent contact zone that was his life and milieu, made him emblematic of a South African possible way of being – always bearing in mind the class, if no longer gender, elitism of this position, its reliance on educational opportunities and the social flexibility they bring. Boehmer also suggests that in his writing style he instantiated the racial inseparability for which he so fervently campaigned all his working life.51
Finally, Plaatje is a coconut because of his association with Shakespeare, that ultimate signifier of fluency in English and of Englishness. He has been appreciated as a potential South African Shakespeare.52 He has also been seen as a representative of the emerging petit-bourgeois African class whose love of Shakespeare becomes a delineating marker of education and civility, and he has been both praised and criticised accordingly.53
Plaatje and Shakespeare
Plaatje makes multiple and repeated use of Shakespeare across his oeuvre of political and creative writing, as well as in his linguistic activism. For example, his novel Mhudi (first published in 1930), which was in part an engagement with the increasingly oppressive legal situation in general, and land politics in particular, draws on Shakespeare thematically and stylistically.54 He also quotes King Lear in Native Life in South Africa in order to authorise his rage and despair at the effects of the 1913 Land Act.55 Furthermore, in his introduction to Diphosophoso, his Setswana translation of A Comedy of Errors, Plaatje says that he translates Shakespeare in order to prove Setswana’s worth and thus attempt to ensure its survival; he is clearly invoking Shakespeare’s status as the best English can do to demand equal respect for a language fast being transformed by colonial and missionary intervention.
To illustrate the creativity of coconuttiness as well
