Kopano Matlwa's Coconut - Dr Lynda Gichanda Spencer (Rhodes University)

In this lecture, Dr Lynda Gichanda Spencer from Rhodes University discusses Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut (2007), a novel that explores the complexities of young Black female identities, aspiration, and alienation in post-apartheid South Africa. Coconut is the story of two Black teenage girls, Fifi and Fiks, who are caught in an “in-between” space of racial and cultural ambiguity – they are either “too black to be white” or “too white to be black” in the social, educational and work lives they inhabit. Dr Spencer explores how language and aesthetics thus become battlegrounds for identity formation, showing how the English accent and Eurocentric beauty standards operate as markers of privilege and exclusion, giving rise to conflicted negotiations between “Africanness” and aspirational “whiteness”. Using theoretical insights from Frantz Fanon and bell hooks, Dr Spencer argues that Coconut critiques internalised racism and the psychological toll of being caught in the “in-between”.

Further Reading

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Pluto, 1952)

bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (South End Press, 1992)

Kopano Matlwa, Coconut (Jacana, 2007)

Achille Mbembe, ‘Aesthetics of superfluity’, Public culture 16.3 (2004), 373- 40

Edward Montle and Mphoto Mogoboya, ‘Deconstructing colonial influence on black South African youth in the post-apartheid era : an exploration of Kopano Matlwa's Coconut’, Journal of African Languages and Literary Studies 1.2 (2020)

Ndumiso Ngcobo, ‘A clear case of coconuttiness’, Mail & Guardian (4 April 2008)

Aretha Phiri, ‘Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut and the Dialectics of Race in South Africa: Interrogating Images of Whiteness and Blackness in Black Literature and Culture’, Safundi 14.2 (2013), 161-174

Lynda Spencer, ‘Young, Black and Female in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Identity Politics in Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut’, Scrunity2 14.1 (2009), 66-78