Coconuts, supposedly robed in the privileges of democracy, are now "behaving badly".
Instead
of becoming the trusted go-betweens between black and white, we are turning to
conceptions of blackness and mobilising our anger at the very idea of the
Rainbow Nation.
The
fantasy of a colour-blind, post-race South Africa has been projected onto
Coconuts but our lived experiences are far from free of racism.
A
"coconut" is described as a person who is black on the outside but
white on the inside. At best, non-white. At worst, Uncle Toms or agents of
whiteness.
I use the
term to refer to an experience of socialisation into what my fellow Coconut
Eusebius McKaiser, a commentator and author, termed "white grammar"
by virtue of having been educated at a formerly white or a private school.
According to Coconut McKaiser, knowledge of "white grammar" is how
you would know that, for example, a "sarmie" is a sandwich or that
"bru" and "oke" are white-speak for "mfwethu".
That
Coconuts are unthinking dupes of whiteness is patently not true. Many Coconuts
, or the so-called "native elite" - think Rolihlahla Mandela,
Mangaliso Sobukwe, Bantu Biko - refused co-option.
I choose
to appropriate the term Coconut and identify myself as one because it offers an
opportunity for refusal, and this very refusal allows for radical anti-racist
politics to emerge. (It is an act of considering myself as part of the black
middle class that is supposedly a buffer against more radical elements. And I
recognise that someone like me "who speaks so well" and "is not
like other black people" can be easily co-opted into maintaining the
inequalities of post-apartheid South Africa.)
A
Coconut's almost-but-not-quite-intimate relationship with whiteness allows us
to begin to critique it in ways that are not as easy to do when on the
"outside".
African
American scholar WEB Du Bois argues that certain pivotal life experiences jolt
black people into "double-consciousness", where an individual's
identity is divided into several faces - "two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body".
There
wasn't one moment but rather a series of moments that "woke me up" -
when invitations to "the farm" from white childhood friends started
to disappear in high school, and how we tacitly accepted that we didn't date
each other.
Through
this, the myth of meritocracy- that if we worked hard enough and spoke well
enough we would have the same opportunities - was revealed.
Much of
this racism was not recognised or articulated until I found the anti-racist
vocabulary with which to name it.
In my
matric year, I encountered books by African authors. On page after page, I
began to read about and, most importantly, feel just how alienated I was from
myself as an African.
The
question that stuck in my mind was: "What would I have been like had it
not been for colonialism?" Why was it that I not only articulated myself
better in English but, painfully, that I actually thought and dreamt in it,
too?
So years
later when poo hit the statue of Cecil John Rhodes it struck a deep emotional
chord within me. The Rhodes Must Fall protests resonated so strongly with the
experiences of black students at historically white universities that other
campus movements, such as the Black Students Movement at Rhodes University,
Open Stellenbosch and Transform Wits, were rejuvenated and formed.
The idea
that black youth were politically apathetic was quickly dispelled as students
began calling for the "decolonising of the university" and, by
implication, of the Rainbow Nation.
Although
the movements are predominantly led by black working-class students and are
driven by their concerns, there are Coconuts among them.
The
question is why are these Coconuts behaving so badly?
For Wits
student Vuyani Pambo taking a taxi every day between Soweto and the elite St
David's College in Sandton led to what he calls a "'bipolaric"
experience.
"You
move around with a permanent sense of exile . You don't belong . in your
neighbourhood [or] at school . you try and negotiate two worlds which don't
come together, set apart geographically, economically, in a way that they never
meet ."
Even when
the demographics of schools shifted from being mostly white pupils to being
predominantly black, they retained the form and culture of white schools.
Coconuts'
engagement with the rules and policies that police blackness, for example hair
regulations at school, makes them more conscious.
But
through their privileged experience Coconuts have gained power and now, with an
arsenal of words and knowledge, can more clearly and readily articulate the
ubiquitous disdain for the Rainbow Nation. One described it as "a gloss
... a palimpsest, painting over racism as opposed to eradicating it".
Coconuts
identify as black as a way to find agency. It allows us to mobilise with others
with similar experiences.
Former
model C and private schools include(d) black children without differentiating
them, despite the different names, despite the different bodies, despite the
different hair, despite the different socioeconomic backgrounds. This is
symbolic of the wider Rainbow Nation project: include blacks but don't dare
touch the underlying structures of inequality that rely on racism.
But
"conscious Coconuts" are clearly disrupting that model.
The
experiences of "inclusive" whiteness that can never truly accommodate
our fullness as black people is what forces us to realise that, no matter how
hard we work or how well we speak, we remain black. That is what forces
Coconuts to become conscious. And in the end, that is what forces us Coconuts
to join the call for Rhodes to Fall.
- Panashe Chigumadzi is the
2015 Ruth First Fellow
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