Shakespeare and the Coconuts

On Post-Apartheid South African Culture

Natasha Distiller

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781868145973
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this book Natasha Distiller explores historic and contemporary uses of Shakespeare in South African society which illustrate the complexities of colonial and post-colonial realities as they relate to iconic Englishness. Beginning with Solomon Plaatje, the author looks at the development of an elite group educated in English and able to use Shakespeare to formulate South African works and South African identities. Refusing simple or easy answers, Distiller then explores the South African Shakespearian tradition postapartheid. Touching on the work of, amongst others, Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, Antony Sher, Stephen Francis, Rico Schacherl and Kopano Matlwa, and including the popular media as well as school textbooks, Shakespeare and the Coconuts engages with aspects of South Africa's complicated, painful, fascinating political and cultural worlds, and their intersections. Written in an accessible style to explain current cultural theory, Shakespeare and the Coconuts will be of interest to students, academics and the general interested reader.

CHAPTER 1

Shakespeare in English, English in South Africa

In her 2007 European Union Literary Award-winning first novel, Kopana Matlwa presents an engaged critique of the primacy of English in the ‘new’ South Africa. Coconut is the story of two young women, Ofilwe and Fikile. The former is part of the emerging black middle class, and has ‘lost’ her culture for an Englished identity in a world of ‘white’ privilege that will never truly accept or know her. Eating with her family at an otherwise whites-only restaurant, she thinks,

We dare not eat with our naked fingertips, walk in generous groups, speak merrily in booming voices … They will scold us if we dare, not with their lips … because the laws prevent them from doing so, but with their eyes. They will shout, ‘Stop acting black!’¹

The latter is desperate to acquire the glamour and power of whiteness in order to escape the poverty and deprivation she sees as intrinsically ‘black’:

‘And you, Fikile, what do you want to be when you grow up?’

‘White, teacher Zola. I want to be white.’ …

‘But Fikile dea r… why would you want to do that … ?’

‘Because it’s better.’

‘What makes you think that, Fikile?’

‘Everything.’²

Part of acquiring whiteness and the class advancement that goes with it is acquiring English, and with it an implictly Anglo-American culture which is relentlessly ‘white’. This is Ofilwe’s ironic ABC:

After-Sun. Bikini. Ballet. Barbie and Ken. Cruise. Disneyland. Disco. Diamonds and Pearls. Easter Egg. Fettucine. Frappe. Fork and Knife. Gymnastics. Horse Riding. Horticulture. House in the Hills. Indoor Cricket. Jungle Gym. Jacuzzi. Jumping Jacks and Flip Flacks. Khaki. Lock. Loiter. Looks like Trouble. Maid. Native. Nameless.

No, not me, Madam. Napoleon. Ocean. Overthrow. Occupy and Rule. Palace. Quantity. Quantify. Queen of England. Red. Sunscreen. Suntan. Sex on the Beach. Tinkerbell. Unicorn. Oopsy daisy. Unwrap them all at once! Video Games. World Wide Web. Wireless Connection. Xmas. Yo-yo Diet. You, You and You. Zero guilt.³

Matlwa’s novel is an attack on ongoing systemic racism and its links to what the book sees as the power bloc that is whiteness and Englishness: the two are inseparable. Thinking of her cousins in the townships, whose parents did not advance economically and who did not have access to the education she was given, Ofilwe says:

I spoke the TV language; the one Daddy spoke at work, the one Mama never could get right, the one that spoke of sweet success.

How can I possibly listen to those who try to convince me otherwise? What has Sepedi ever done for them? Look at those sorrowful cousins of mine who think that a brick is a toy. Look at me. Even the old people know I am special…. They smile at me and say, ‘You, our child, must save all your strength for your books.’ Do you see, I always tell my cousins, that they must not despair, as soon as my schooling is over I will come back and teach them English and then they will be special too?⁴

Shakespeare has a small but significant cameo role in the book, as the rhetorical trappings in the speech and subjectivity of an emasculated, abusive, poor, black man with a useless English education. Unlike Ofilwe’s English, which makes her special, Uncle’s Shakespearean English just makes him exploitable and, in Fikile’s words, pathetic.

This book takes Coconut’s understanding of the intertwining of whiteness, Englishness, and social and economic power as its starting point and its end point. Apposite to this discussion is the assumption embedded in the very idea of a coconut that culture and identity are and should be contained, controlled, pure, and raced. Immediately following the extract above, where Ofilwe naïvely celebrates how her English, linked to her class status, makes her ‘special’, Matlwa inserts the following vignette:

Katlego Matuana-George, dressed in a Vanguard Creation, sells the cover of this month’s Fresh magazine. Katlego, the former principal dancer of the renowned Von Holt School of Modern Dancing … shares that she tries to have as many equestrian weekends with her husband Tom at their farm in the north as possible. It helps to ground her and allows her the latitude to reflect on her life.⁵

‘Katlego Matuana-George’ is not a character in the book and does not recur. She is clearly a satire on a blackness saturated with class privilege and the veneer of whiteness that goes with it. Her clothes, her ‘modern’ dancing, her white husband and their ranch ‘in the north’ are all indicators of a blackness not just altered but ameliorated by its exposure to cultural colonisation.

The relationship between all these markers – identity, language, race, and, as Matlwa’s novel also painfully shows through Fikile’s association of personal advancement with whiteness, class – is exemplified in the history of how English came to South Africa, who spoke it, why, and how. Gender is also a factor in this history, not least because it is often missing. One of the many interesting contributions Coconut makes to this issue is the fact of its protagonists’ and its author’s gender – the first comment by a female insider since Noni Jabavu’s autobiographical The Ochre People (1963).⁶ Gendered experience features in aspects of the novel’s detail – in Ofilwe’s internalisation of ‘yo-yo dieting’, and in both girls’ obsessions with their hair and Fikile’s with her green contact lenses. It also features in the implication at the end of the novel that Fikile is headed towards sexual exploitation by an old white man: ‘Anything worth having in life comes at a price, a price that is not always easy to pay. Maybe Paul is right … He seems to really like me … What do I have to lose?’⁷ The obvious answer, everything she has left of her already battered sense of self, speaks in a gendered way to what the novel presents as the cost of exposure to a world by now saturated with commodification, economic, social, and linguistic power relations, and perverted racialised values. As I explained in the introduction and as I will go on to explore in more detail in this chapter, while it is imperative to remain cognisant of the very real violent histories behind this understanding of identity, race, and language in the region, the either/or presentation of the possibilities for being South African in 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 Matth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Shakespeare in English, English in South Africa
• Chapter 2: ‘Through Shakespeare’s Africa’: ‘Terror and murder’?
• Chapter 3: Tony’s Will: Titus Andronicus in South Africa, 1995
• Chapter 4: Begging the questions: Producing Shakespeare for post-apartheid South African schools
• Chapter 5: English and the African Renaissance
• Chapter 6: Shakespeare and the coconuts
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index