Shakespeare and the Coconuts. Natasha Distiller

in response to the question, why is Shakespeare still important in South Africa today (or, more specifically, why did Shakespeare comprise an influence on writing in English in the region, or why do people still argue about Shakespeare’s relevance)?, most people say, not least because it is what they have been taught at school, that Shakespeare’s work is relevant to South Africa because his themes are universal. All people, after all, have issues with their parents (King Lear, Hamlet), or are jealous about something (Othello), or can relate to forbidden love (Romeo and Juliet), and so on. But all good literature is universal. The best will deal with human emotions that we can all relate to. How is it, then, that Shakespeare is the standard for universal humanity and not Chinua Achebe? More pointedly, why is Shakespeare considered universal and Chinua Achebe considered the spokesman for a specific culture?

      If we leave aside the workings of colonial value systems obviously at play in the comparison between Shakespeare’s universality and Achebe’s tribal specificity, the answers to questions about why Shakespeare has become the embodiment of literary universality in English lie in specific material histories. These include the history of the British theatre in the seventeenth century, in the development of editing as a scholarly practice in the eighteenth century, and in the social dynamics of an education system developed during British colonialism in the nineteenth century, which is tied to English nationalism. It may seem that I am now saying that Shakespeare is indeed a colonial import. It is a short step from there to the assertion that his texts have no place in South Africa. This would put me in the camp of those who, like the Kenyan writer and activist Ngugi wa Thiong’o, would reject the effects of colonial history and seek to recover an authentic African literature or history or experience. What I want to make clear in this introduction, however, is that I find conceptualisations of culture (and the identities on which experiences of culture and tradition depend) as ever having been pure, as idealised, or as reclaimable, to be invested political and psychological fictions.

      Over and above our South African Shakespearean tradition, there are other reasons to retain an interest in Shakespeare in post-colonial and post-apartheid South Africa. In the first place, all knowledge is relevant to all people, and for that reason alone Shakespeare belongs to us as much as ‘he’ does to anyone else. In the second place, Shakespeare has cultural capital that Africans are as entitled to as anyone else. In the third place, Shakespeare is a part of African experience. But these justifications rehearse recognisable positions in an old and, in my opinion, quite tired debate, which ultimately relies on the reinscription of colonial and apartheid binaries, where one is either ‘authentically’ African or able to access so-called European culture. As our own writers have indicated from at least Solomon Plaatje onwards, and as De Kok’s poem also illustrates, this is a false binary. In post-apartheid South Africa, after all, isn’t this kind of traditional coconut logic exactly what we want to be moving away from?

      The term ‘coconut’ is one of several edible designations, including ‘bounty’ (from the American Bounty chocolate bar), ‘topdeck’ (a South African chocolate bar), ‘apple’, ‘banana’, and, of course, ‘oreo’ (from the American Oreo cookie), used to designate someone who, due to their behaviour, identifications, or because they have been raised by whites,² is ‘black’ on the ‘outside’ and ‘white’ on the ‘inside’.³ These terms are in operation in the UK, USA, South Africa, New Zealand, and China, amongst other places. The focus on ‘acting’ or ‘feeling’ ‘white’ in a range of communities across the globe points to the ongoing prevalence of white privilege as a structuring principle of our neo-colonial world.⁴ The different terms also speak to the imbrication of racial profiling with personal identity, in that ethnicity is yoked to skin colour, which in turn is presumed to designate a fixed identity. ‘Coconut’ specifically, although used in South Africa to denote black people (most often with a particular kind of education which includes fluency in English and a media profile, as in ‘coconut intellectuals’), has provenance elsewhere as a term for people considered ‘brown’, not ‘black’: Asians, Indians, Latinos, Filipinos.⁵ In all places, used by those who are claiming access to an authentic blackness of whatever shade, the term has derogatory implications of inauthenticity, artificiality, and sometimes shameful or shameless aspiration. In South Africa, the appellation ‘coconut’ is currently in extensive circulation, and is closely tied to class mobility as indicated specifically through speaking a specific kind of ‘white’ English.⁶

      This conceptualisation of personal identity is crude in its essentialising of blackness and whiteness, and reliant on notions of cultural authenticity. Assertions of cultural purity and their concomitant legitimations, invocations of tradition, are nostalgic and political, if powerful, fictions. This book intends to challenge the negative implications of the accusation of coconuttiness, while still retaining an awareness of the histories of power and overpowering which give the label its bite. It explores the workings of the notion of the coconut specifically in relation to a number of ways Shakespeare might be experienced in post-apartheid South Africa. In the end, I suggest two new ways of understanding coconuttiness, which offer new definitions that refuse the binary logic of the original meaning, without losing sight of the embodied experiences of living (with) race in South Africa today.

       Overview

      I begin with the past. In the first chapter I sketch the history of English and Englishness in the region, and place Shakespeare’s symbolic English Literariness in context. I also focus on Solomon Plaatje as the first example of a (newly defined) South African coconut. I do this to suggest that his uses of Shakespeare allow us to explore the processes of cultural transformations, personal identification, and class complicities at work, in ways which point to the realities of colonial experience. These ways belie colonial and apartheid binaries, including constructions of Europe, and Europe’s relation to its construction of Africa and Africans. This history also allows us to see the complex and ambivalent inheritances which are ours as South Africans, and which other recent work on English Literature, on modernity, and on their material processes in South Africa has illustrated.⁷ Given Plaatje’s lifelong commitment to achieving political and cultural recognition for black South Africans, calling him a coconut helps to begin to reformulate the charge of race treachery implicit in the term as it currently stands.

      From positions 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