Why South Africans don't get the question of the coconut

In this interview Kharnita Mohamed of the Programme on Traditions and Transformation at the University of South Africa’s Institute for Social and Health talks of why South Africans don’t get the question of the coconut. The interview followed her piece, 'I see coconuts everywhere!' (http://transformingtraditions.blogspot.com/2011/11/i-see-coconuts-everywhere.html). Why do we not get it? Because, she says, the politics of someone like Lindiwe Mazibuko, the new Democratic Alliance parliamentary leader, whatever they are, will get tainted by her black body that sounds wrong, lives wrong, dresses wrong, affiliates wrong, because she is thought to be a coconut. She says the idea that if you are black (or white) you ought to sound or look a certain way and live in a certain place is unfair, cruel, limiting besides its wrongness. She says we must love coconuts. She says we should get over the lies of whiteness and blackness, otherwise we are continuing the tradition of policing racialised boundaries and so reproducing apartheid ideologies.That's what she says.