The Ethics of Hesitation in Coconut Kelz’s Guide to Surviving This Shithole (2019)

While Lesego Tlhabi’s satirical persona, Coconut Kelz, has been studied for her widely shared vlogs, little attention has been paid to her satirical ‘how-to’ guide to surviving contemporary South Africa. In this article I argue that Tlhabi’s satirical ‘how-to’ guide frames the character of ‘the coconut’ as a critical site for interrogating racialised habits of perception, thought, and embodiment. Through close-reading of the text, I show how Tlhabi’s use of hyperbole, paradox, mimicry, intertextuality, and a deliberate misreading of racial bodies exposes the inherent irrationality, and indeed comedy, of the South African colonial imaginary. Each of these techniques undergirds what Alia Al-Saji (2014) has described as a “phenomenology of hesitation” which I identify operating throughout Tlhabi’s guide. Through highlighting an ethics of hesitation, the satire disrupts the perceptual habits that naturalise race-thinking by producing indirect strategies of uncertainty which keep open the possibility of inhabiting a future beyond the colonial imaginary. This ‘beyond’ is paradoxically intimated in Tlhabi’s play with racialised rhetoric, a play that marks Kelz, and ‘the coconut,’ as a heterotopic figure whose comedic failure to inhabit both Blackness and whiteness fully emphasise the unending evolution of what it means to be ‘Black’ and/or ‘white’ in South Africa.