Shakespeare and the Coconuts. Natasha Distiller

Coconut are limiting. More than this, the argument that to be black means one cannot also own English or modernity is reductive of current identifications and ignorant of an extremely rich and important local history as well.

      Exploring the multilayered history of English in South Africa – as a language, as a formal field of study, in its relation to the processes and structures of colonialism – enables us to see some of the complexities of what it means to be South African: what it means now, and what it always has meant, despite rigorous attempts by apartheid engineering to suggest otherwise.⁸ This social and political history, embedded as it is in multiple complicities and contradictions of identification, enables us to see why Coconut’s vision of the relationship between race, culture, privilege, and language, important as it is not least for its articulation of intransigent structural racism as well as for its introduction of gender as an important issue, is flawed. More than this, it can be dangerous. This is evident when we look at how the link between race, culture, language, and a sense that privilege is ‘white’ (disavowing the new economic privilege on the rise in the country) is being deployed when some politicians find their backs to the proverbial wall. Just one example is erstwhile ANC Youth League President Julius Malema’s extraordinary verbal attack on BBC journalist Jonah Fisher in 2010. Fisher challenged Malema’s criticism of Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change party for having offices in the affluent Johannesburg area of Sandton. This, Malema suggested, made them inauthentic. Fisher pointed out that Malema himself lives in Sandton. Malema’s response was to call for Fisher’s removal from the press conference, accusing him of racism, and of participating in the white/English control of international media spaces which by definition disrespected the ANC and black people in general.⁹ Malema’s defensive aggression, here and elsewhere, is predicated on the presentation of white people as by definition not, and anti-, African, as conspiring to keep economic privilege to themselves, and as enacting a politics of resentment towards black men who have ‘made it’ in ‘white’ terms. In this racialised performance, there is no room for the idea that to be South African is to exist in a complex personal and social relation to markers of race, privilege, language, and culture.

      I am not presuming to sum up the content of a South African identity, or to contain it in a label. Focussing on an aspect of how English and Englishness has helped to shape some of us, and has in turn been shaped in specific ways here, enables us to see that binary constructions of identity and culture are artificial constructs. It also enables us to see the ways in which some of the positions taken by our current leadership in the name of an African identity politics are much more historically complicated than their rhetorical performances might suggest. Whether this is Thabo Mbeki’s investment in an African Renaissance,¹⁰ Julius Malema’s invocation of an old colonial rhetoric, often to silence opposition¹¹ (which I think of as Mugabism, in its patent self-servicing and when placed together with the self-enriching activities of these men who claim to act in the name of a post-colonial justice for ‘the people’), or Jacob Zuma’s deployment of tribal authenticity to justify his gender politics,¹² these constructions of the genuinely African rely on a binary version of whiteness. This politically useful Africanness, while it speaks to real, ongoing issues of inherited inequalities which remain primarily raced, is artifically purified, purged of the messiness of historical interaction. Examining the role of English in colonising South Africa, and the ongoing legacies which have resulted, is one way to point to the actual complexities at work, and to counter the current tendencies to return to a simplified and simplistic racialised discourse of us and them. It also forces us to keep centre stage the issue of class and gender privilege that has always been a part of this history, and, of course, to acknowledge the ways in which colonialism denigrated ‘black’ cultures.

      I aim to investigate the complexities of Englishness in South Africa through the thoroughly overdetermined figure of Shakespeare – overdetermined simultaneously as the sign of English Literature and as the sign of universal humanity, and overdetermined as a marker of culture. We cannot, and should not, deny our fraught history of unequal power relations and colonial, apartheid, and, indeed, neo-colonial and neo-apartheid exploitations. Nevertheless, the presence of English here, as a language and as a series of texts available to South African writers, has always meant more than the simplistic presentation of ‘the West’s’ cultural hegemony over a putatively ‘pure’ African space or subject can capture.

      In this chapter I sketch what English first meant to those South African subjects who encountered it as formational of their social and, to a greater or lesser degree, personal identities. This takes us back to the time of the mission schools and the initial colonial encounters which helped to forge a new class of African men. Within the history of an English and Englishing education, I will focus on Shakespeare’s role as the ubertext of English Literature, and the way ‘his’ texts and ‘his’ signifying potential were taken up by a specific, central figure. Solomon Plaatje, a founding member of the ANC and of indigenous journalism, and a political and linguistic activist, was also a founding South African Shakespearean. His use of Shakespeare combines these two activisms, demonstrating how Shakespeare has been made indigenous. Crucially, Plaatje’s life story and his work also demonstrate how the South African history of oppression and struggle were formative of this indigenous Shakespeare, which went on to exceed colonial control.

      I suggest ways in which this colonial history, and Shakespeare’s place in it in particular via the example of Plaatjie,¹³ can be read as a complex, complicitous, contradictory 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