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Introduction

Ingrid de Kok’s poem ‘Merchants in Venice’ addresses the relationship between rich, established Europe and its so-called high culture, and poor, entrepreneurial Africa. The poem offers ways to read the presence of Africans in this famous landscape. One of the poem’s subtexts speaks to Africans’ political, economic, and cultural rights, and the disavowal, refusal, or lack of their recognition. Ancient histories of exchange resonate with the globalised present, as the young men of De Kok’s poem are saturated, not only in Venice’s celebrated light, but also in relations of power that span time and place, and are imbricated with the markers of culture invoked by the poem’s descriptions as well as by its title:

Merchants in Venice

We arrive in Venice to ancient acoustics:

the swaddling of paddle in water,

thud of the vaporetto against the landing site,

and the turbulent frescoes of corridors and ceilings,

belief and power sounding history

with the bells of the subdivided hour,

on water, air and all surfaces of light.

What have we Africans to do with this?

With holy water, floating graves and cypresses,

the adamantine intricacy of marble floors,

gold borders of faith, Mary’s illuminated face

and the way Tintoretto’s Crucifixion is weighted

with the burden of everyday sin and sweat,

while the city keeps selling its history and glass.

On the Rialto, tourists eye the wares

of three of our continent’s diasporic sons,

young men in dreadlocks and caps, touting

leather bags and laser toys in the subdued dialect

of those whose papers never are correct,

homeboys now in crowded high-rise rooms

edging the embroidered city.

How did they get from Dakar to Venice?

What brotherhood sent them to barter and pray?

And on long rainy days when the basilica

levitates, dreaming of drowning,

do they think of their mission and mothers,

or hover and hustle like apprentice angels

over the shrouded campos and spires?

Into the city we have come for centuries,

buyers, sellers, mercenaries, spies,

artists, saints, the banished,

and boys like these: fast on their feet,

carrying sacks of counterfeit goods,

shining in saturated light,

the mobile inheritors of any renaissance.¹

De Kok’s poem brings to the surface what is hidden beneath the beautiful veneer of European culture, ‘the way Tintoretto’s Crucifixion is weighted / with the burden of everyday sin and sweat, / while the city keeps selling its history and glass’.

Commerce and its patterns of exploitation, and the real lives of real people lived above, beneath, and within the layers of art and history that comprise the physical and cultural architecture of Venice, inform Europe’s beautiful objects and invest them with a different meaning to their commodified claims to fame. The poem insists on this without reducing Europe’s artistic accomplishments to instrumentalist objects of power and overpowering. At the same time, the poem makes visible the human struggles which belie any easy celebration of intrinsic worth. It brings history and politics into art. It also stakes a claim for what Africans are entitled to inherit from this history, by insisting that they have always been a part of the grubby, painful human living which makes high art, which enables it to exist as object and as artefact. Europe’s art would not mean what it does without Africa, that is, without its exploited human and other resources, and its symbolic position in a global history and economy. With this acknowledgement, Africans’ relationship to Europe’s texts and treasures becomes participatory. At the same time, ‘art’, ‘Europe’, and ‘Africa’ are all located in the realities of daily life, within the dynamics of which each concept is constructed.

The poem allows for a discussion of the ways that people produce artefacts and ideas. Some of the most celebratory writing about Shakespeare can make it sound like we are products of Shakespeare’s texts, which become ahistorical and unimplicated in politics and materiality. This book describes some of the ways Shakespeare’s texts have been implicated in South African history, politics, and materiality. In addition, it explores how and why this history matters.

Let me say from the outset that while I am arguing against seeing Shakespeare’s literary or philosophical influence in South Africa as proof of ‘his’ universality, I am not therefore arguing that ‘he’ has no ‘authentic’ place in South Africa. Indeed, the anxieties about authenticity and belonging raised by debates on Shakespeare are far more interesting to me than what I consider to be historically inaccurate and theoretically naïve statements that rely on essentialised versions of concepts such as ‘culture’, ‘African’, ‘European’. De Kok’s poem makes it clear that these ideas are always products of material history, of people’s investments (financial and emotional), of complex human processes.

Shakespeare and coconut logic

There is a long tradition of South Africans appropriating Shakespeare, which goes back to the colonial mission schools. The nature of that appropriation is complex, and involves sociopolitical interactions and aspirations, including specific colonial, South African, incarnations of the dynamics of class mobility and modernisation, their relation to Christianity, to English as a language of social and therefore economic power, and to English Literature as a formalised field of study. South Africans who have entered into this tradition have been seen as selling out to a kind of colonial coconuttiness which enabled the entrenchment of a racist social system, or as transforming the master’s tools in order to dismantle his house. However you want to read their behaviour, the fact remains that they read, loved, and used Shakespeare in their own lives and works. So Shakespeare has an African history, which is as African as any other aspect of the region’s cultural development. To say this is to take a political stand, one which refuses to see colonial history and its aftermath as containable by binaries: coloniser/colonised, oppressor/oppressed, European/ African. I am not for a moment suggesting that the multiple violences of colonial history, the apartheid regime which it enabled, and the ongoing inequalities which are our legacy were or are in any way excusable. I am suggesting, as have many other cultural critics and anthropologists, that human interactions and the artefacts they produce are always complicated. To say that South Africa’s history has always been a history of complicities and complex engagements and influences is not to ameliorate the racist, gendered, classed violence of the region. This book argues that exploring aspects of the ways Shakespeare has been used, appropriated, symbolised, and reproduced in post-apartheid South Africa is one way to begin to see the complexities and paradoxes of our national history. This is a particularly apposite argument now, as raced identities are increasingly reinscribed in public discourse, encouraged by the posturing of some of our leading politicians.

Many of our writers have appropriated Shakespeare. It is not a question of looking for a South African writer who is ‘like’ or ‘as good as’ or ‘trying to be’ Shakespeare. And it is certainly not a question of finding evidence of Shakespeare’s universality in the fact of ‘his’ having been used by Africans. If we dispense with the too-easy answer of ‘universality’ (which is too easy not least because it is disingenuous), we can explore more interesting answers to the question, why was it Shakespeare these writers appropriated, and with whom we are still concerned in sometimes quite highly charged debates? This question draws us into a cultural history which teaches us about how cultural value is invested and perpetuated, bought and sold, if you like, as well as experienced and owned by individuals (think again of De Kok’s poem). It also enables us to trace the power relations in English Literature as a field of study, and English as a language of social and political power, in our region. Looking at these processes, amongst others (such as the history of Shakespeare editing practices), enables us to see why the language of universal relevance is disingenuous, and to uncover its own political history and material investments.

Nevertheless, 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 for recognising the relationship between the African Renaissance and Eng Lit (by which I mean to designate English Literature as a formal field of study), and therefore the inheritances of English for South Africa, specifically in its implications for those of us in the economic and linguistic elite of the country. The African Renaissance, which depends in part on what Shakespeare has come to stand for in the neo-colonial world, uses this dependency to argue for a traditional Africanness. In its complex and contradictory cultural work, the concept of the African Renaissance makes clear that our post-colonial and post-apartheid present is constituted by loss and fracture. We must own this starting point, which goes right back to Plaatje, in order to explore our possibilities for the future, or we will remain stuck in the logic of our terrible past.

The African Renaissance was Thabo Mbeki’s baby, and it is no coincidence that this most eruditely self-fashioned of presidents was saturated with Shakespeare in his public persona. In the final chapter, I suggest that post-Polokwane and Mbeki’s spectacular fall from power, the familiar version of high-cultural Shakespeare now definitely stands for something un-South-African in the popular imagination. In the colonial and apartheid past, Shakespeare stood for empowerment in a socio-economic system dominated by ‘white’ culture. To know your Shakespeare was to contest your positioning as a ‘native’. Recently, however, Shakespeare seems to have come to stand for something else. The changed meaning of Shakespeare is related to the charged meaning of English, as a language and as a coconut identity in post-apartheid South Africa. As material inequalities continue to worsen, and as English remains the necessary pathway to economic advancement even as our education system deteriorates, the coconut becomes a figure of privilege increasingly accused of rejecting and so betraying his or her African roots.

Reclaiming the coconut

In an article published in 2007, the same year as Kopano Matlwa’s novel Coconut won the European Union Literary Award, Andile Mngxitama calls a new generation of ‘influential young people … neither black nor white’.⁸ Although they constitute a numerical minority, he says, ‘they are a cultural majority’. Mngxitama accuses this generation of Africans of being agents of colonialism along the lines of Fanon’s mimic men, ‘“black outside and white inside”’. He descries their lack of interest in their own history, and accuses them of being ‘agents of whiteness’ who will inherit the new South Africa and set the terms for a denigration of blackness, including black languages. While the political imperatives underlying this critique remain important – the production of an economic elite when poverty remains a dire issue, the lack of support for indigenous African languages, the youth’s relationship of disavowal to the country’s racialised history which allows inherited structures to perpetuate unchallenged – what I wish to refute in this book is the binary logic which continues to structure public discourse about who and what South Africans can and should be in relation to each other. Characterising this emerging elite as ‘white’ on the ‘inside’ reproduces a version of culture as capable of being authentically or inauthentically African, a version which is currently being deployed by the very political leaders who continue to let us down. It is also ignorant of the history Mngxitama wishes our youngsters would own. Perhaps if we begin to teach a version of South Africanness that is fundamentally coconutty, we can recapture the interest of the generation emerging as inheritors of that particular history. And I mean by this to remake the idea or reclaim the image of the coconut: Mngxitama invokes the commonsensical notion that a coconut is made of an outside and a differently ‘coloured’ inside.

My reclamation of the term is, of course, in part ironic and provocative. The coconut is useful as a psychologically loaded symbol, one which encodes racial histories and identity struggles. In arguing for using the icon anew, I am suggesting that its logic of outside and inside be refused, and that instead we celebrate what the charge of coconuttiness is trying to name in its derogatory way. As I will keep reiterating, I am not simultaneously arguing for a version of history which denies the oppression that was perpetuated in the name of racism, or the suffering that black people had to endure because they were black. That racialised past, and its consequences, are very much with us today. But I am arguing that there is also a version of South Africanness that has always existed, which cannot be captured by a binary logic, and which may be very productive of a way forward for our national imaginary. Because it is rooted in history, it is not like the anodyne rainbow nationhood that Mngxitama rightly objects to.

I use Shakespeare to demonstrate the genesis of and potential in our reformulated coconut possibilities. That this reclaimed coconuttiness has tended not to make it to our public performances, textual or political, is evidence of the ongoing power of the colonial and apartheid binary logic in which one is either/or: either authentically African, or European; either a purified and nostalgic version of black, or white (on the inside, or otherwise). As I argue in the final chapter, the ongoing power of this binary is reflective of very real ongoing inequalities which tend to remain raced, and of the existence of inherited structures of white privilege within which all South Africans have to try to make it. But at the same time, I also want to point out the ways in which discourses of authentic blackness and traitorous whiteness are easy political tools, which deny aspects of our history and our identities for expedient and dangerous agendas. These range from a murderous homophobia to a violent misogyny, to a form of political smokescreening, where colonial history is rhetorically deployed by leaders whose corrupt practices ensure they benefit from the system, the exploitative qualities of which they lay at the feet of white people.

Ultimately, I hope to make it clear that Shakespeare’s cultural value is, in our context, a complex signifier. While in the course of the arguments made here I do argue for some of the implications of the fact that English Literature as a discipline, and Shakespeare as one of its foundational figures, are both colonial imports developed to be colonising tools, I am not suggesting that Shakespeare therefore has no place in post-apartheid South Africa. I invoke the idea of the coconut, not to endorse its reductive and contained notions of race and identity, but to challenge those ideas and to reclaim the image of the black person worked on by history through English. Perhaps some South Africans have always been coconuts – that is, have internalised and been formed by a relation with English – and we should start to understand coconuttiness as a legitimate identity. I cannot, according to the logic of my argument, call it an authentic identity, since the language of authenticity has been too often invoked in the names of a putatively pure Africanness or a whiteness in need of protection from contamination. But I am suggesting that the messy in-betweenness, the mixed-up inside-outsideness of the coconut trope may be a more accurate descriptor of what some South African subjectivities have always been, since the region first encountered English. Ultimately, I argue, what we in post-apartheid South Africa need to leave behind are precisely those colonial and apartheid binaries which fail to describe who and what we – that complex, fractured, differential South African citizenry – are and, more importantly, who and what we can be.

Who are ‘we’?

‘We’ is a tenuously created category, stitched together with deep ambivalences of signification. May ‘we’ at least remember that, if nothing else.⁹

In the course of this book I will refer to ‘us’, South Africans. Given the diversity of people’s experiences of nationhood and citizenship and the vast discrepancies in access to services, living and working conditions, and other class-, race-, and gender-inflected differences of experience in this country, it is important to specify that the ‘we’ to which I refer cannot be taken to mean all South Africans. Indeed, the history of access to literacy in English in this country, and particularly to exposure to canonical English Literature taught in the traditional way, has always been class-inflected for most South Africans. Those with access to mission-school education, in colonial times, were by and large the ones who became writers in English. Under apartheid, Bantu Education inflected English Literature teaching very differently for most black South Africans. So in the first place, ‘we’ are those South Africans of a limited range of classes and literacies that enabled us to encounter English, Eng Lit, and Shakespeare, in ways which made it possible to enjoy and sometimes own the literature, and to profit from fluency in English.

Secondly, although most white South Africans will not have a personal identity investment in the idea of African tradition or reclaimed Africanness (although some do – presumably those who have been called to become sangomas, for example, have at least partial access to a personal sense of African tradition), many of us are invested in the discussions about Africanness. From commercial and tourist performances¹⁰ to nationalist constructions, to contestations over who qualifies as an African (after centuries of disavowal, many whites are now anxious to claim an African identity of sorts), personal identities with regard to Africa and Africanness are helping to form and formulate post-apartheid identity in general. ‘We’ can then be South Africans of any of the ‘races’ who have encountered Shakespeare via institutions which disseminate Eng Lit, with all the access, and subjection, to systemic power (gendered, social, economic, and, eventually, political) this implies.

‘We’ also exist in a time and space variously called post- or neo-colonial, and/or post- or neo-apartheid. These designations are not uncontested. It is true they are politically simplistic given, not least, the diversity of experiences of the past and present in this country that makes a definition of who ‘we’ are necessary in the first place. Different South Africans also have very different future possibilities from one another; if we are all post- anything, some of us are more post- than others, and many of us are differently post- from one another. Nevertheless, in the course of this book, I will use these terms because they are a convenient shorthand: I use post-colonial and post-apartheid mainly as historical markers, although post-colonial also refers to a body of work or an approach in the academy. Neo-colonial and neo-apartheid are used when I want to acknowledge that the inheritances of colonialism and apartheid are still with us, that these historical events have shaped the present in ways that make the moniker ‘post-’ optimistic. After all, the fact of this book, an engagement with Shakespeare in South Africa, is evidence of the neo-colonial reality in which we live as post-apartheid South Africans.