Kopano Matlwa's Coconut: Identity Issues in Our Faces

Abstract

This article demonstrates how Kopano Matlwa's recent novel, Coconut, highlights the faultlines that persist in contemporary South African society. The dangers of binary thinking and certain modernist approaches are discussed, and the influence of racist and colonial approaches is demonstrated. Coconut reflects current South African social and political realities, showing how the results of apartheid continue to haunt race relations, and how structures that promote inequality and fix identity survive by skilful adaptation to changing circumstances. This article espouses Stuart Hall's notion that social empowerment and justice flourish when an open society, conscious of an oppressive past, allows individual identity to adapt in organic, rather than prescriptive, ways. The article closes with an appeal by Mamphele Rampele for South Africans to embrace the past, in order to transform it.