Shakespeare’s dramas, on the other hand, show that nobility and valor, like depravity and cowardice, are not the monopoly of any color. Shakespeare lived over 300 years ago, but he appears to have had a keen grasp of human character. His description of things seems so inwardly correct that (in spite of our rapid means of communication and facilities for traveling) we of the present age have not yet equaled his acumen.64
Plaatje, writing in London, speaks to an English audience when he denotes himself and his audience as ‘we of the present age’. In speaking in English, of Shakespeare, Plaatje demonstrates that he shares with his audience an appreciation of Shakespeare as well as a modern cosmopolitanism. Plaatje has claimed the language and its most famous son as his own, and in living that identity, in the act of writing, he self-consciously also counters typical colonial charges against African subjects of Empire, of barbarism or backwardness. At the same time, Plaatje’s allusion to the inwardly incorrect nature of ‘the present age’, ‘in spite of our rapid means of communication and … traveling’, allows him to critique the ignorance implicit in the racism in the films to which he refers. He also implicitly invokes Shakespeare’s putative universally human status to endorse this judgement.
In all this, we see how Plaatje used Shakespeare to make a claim for his, and his people’s, already-proven inclusion in the realm of imperial citizenry and the modernity it claimed to stand for. This claim is indeed Janus-faced: in claiming space in imperial universality, Plaatje simultaneously deployed Shakespeare as ‘a useful instrument with which to sustain his own culture, language, and political identity’.65
But Plaatje does not just have Shakespeare to use as a tool. Plaatje relates an anecdote of how Shakespeare’s English functioned as the language of love between himself and his wife-to-be (they both read Romeo and Juliet, he goes on to say, since their cultural situation mimicked the play’s):
While reading Cymbeline, I met the girl who afterwards became my wife. I was not then as well acquainted with her language – the Xhosa – as I am now; and although she had a better grip of mine – the Sechuana – I was doubtful whether I could make her understand my innermost feelings in it, so in coming to an understanding we both used the language of educated people – the language which Shakespeare wrote – which happened to be the only official language of our country at the time.66
If this is allowed to be not just the chance for him to make a political point about English rule and the responsibilities that should implictly come with that status towards such obviously Anglo-identified subjects, but also the record of a moment of intimacy and connection not only through but with a literary text, Shakespeare is clearly not just a tool. ‘His’ texts, their literary power, their putatively universal messages have been interpolated and owned, claimed.
Plaatje and the others that followed him were Englished subjects, subjects of and in English. But not in a slavish or solely colonised sense, pace Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s formulation. Reading Plaatje positively as a coconut is a way to take seriously the elite colonial subjectivity he can be made to represent. His paradoxical stance becomes the picture not of the ventriloquising subaltern, able only to mimic, however subversively. Taking Plaatje’s coconuttiness seriously is a way to see him and the men of his class as far more complex than simply positioned in relation to the colonisers who may have had a lot to do with determining the terms of possibility for them, but certainly did not control their responses, much as they may have tried. Plaatje, and the coconuts who follow, born into the cultural, political, and social ‘Situation’ which was and is South Africa following on from Plaatje’s time, were legitimate African subjects.
Indeed, Plaatje’s coconuttiness could be said to exemplify the way identity functions, especially in as complex a space as post-apartheid South Africa:
A subjectivity such as his, inhabiting a place of difference so clearly constructed for it and aspiring in every way to counter the fixed conceptions attached to it, can only be aware of the provisional nature of identity, especially as it is developed within cross-cultural representations.67
The spaces of human interaction after colonial contact, fraught and unequal as they were and as they remain, produced subjects who can never return to a place of imagined pure Africanness, if indeed such a place ever truly existed. Instead, for those of us able to occupy the elite space of even relative economic stability, coconuttiness can be the marker of a constituting interdiscursivity which is as African as the history of South Africa itself. Like Plaatje’s Shakespeare, the African coconut is both/and, both Englished and transforming of Englishness. And this is a legitimate South African identity.
English in South Africa, Shakespeare in South Africa
There is no intrinsic reason why Shakespeare’s texts should be made to speak to South African issues outside of the inheritances of the colonial system which entrenched Shakespeare as the paragon of literature. At the same time, there is an African Shakespearean tradition which exists in our history, which begins with Plaatje, and which is absent from most South Africans’ experiences of what Shakespeare can and does mean. This is clear in Matlwa’s novel, where the weak and emasculated Uncle stands for what the educated Englished black man can become in post-apartheid South Africa. This is a sharp comment on the figure of the earlier, mission-educated young man, who was meant to be groomed as a leader of ‘his people’, and was skilled to navigate the new system on their behalf:
Uncle just came home after his first semester at the University of Cape Town with a letter of exclusion from the medical school in his bookbag … He lay in bed for weeks sobbing … and that was the end of Uncle the smart one, the one who spoke the white man’s language, the one who would save us. 68
For Matlwa, an educated woman writing in English about the benefits and costs of being an Englished African subject today, the figure of a constructed leader of ‘his people’ spouting Shakespeare is an aspirant doomed to fail in a corrupt and hypocritical system. This post-apartheid critique echoes the kinds of criticisms levelled against the men of Plaatje’s ilk by a later generation of angry youth less willing to play the civil game in the face of politics in twentieth-century South Africa.69 As I go on to argue in the last chapter, which looks in more detail at Coconut, self-delusional Uncle might be what the Shakespearised coconut has become in post-apartheid South Africa. If, for Plaatje, Shakespeare was the embodiment of what Engish had to offer, in our times Shakespeare may be the embodiment of its empty promises. Given this move towards binary meanings, it remains important to remember that the subject of English – the language, the literature, and the figure of the South African made by and in English(ed) systems of power – becomes evidence for the actual complexity of the apparently oppositional positions English is increasingly invoked to endorse in the current political climate.
The history of Shakespeare in South Africa encapsulates the complex regional history of complicities, contestations, reclamations, and resistances which comprise the true meaning of the coconut. Material privilege, aspiration, identity politics, and race politics all adhere in messy and complicated ways to ‘English’ and to ‘Shakespeare’, as indeed they always have.
The chapters that follow demonstrate this complex, contradictory subject by offering case studies of what Shakespeare has been to, and for, a range of South African subject positions. It becomes clear how often ‘he’ is invoked to shore up an identity binary which draws its power from the privilege which (still) accrues to English and to the whiteness with which it is associated. This is one of Matlwa’s points in Coconut. At the same time, as I have been arguing, the presence of a genuinely South African ownership of Shakespeare – complex, complicit, contradictory as this is – as seen in the work of Plaatje, for example, demonstrates the artificiality of this binary, and exposes discourses of African authenticity as artificial and impossibly nostalgic. It demonstrates the true melange which is by now a paradoxically ‘authentic’