Reporting on his expulsion from the presidency in 2008, the Christian Science Monitor headed the story of Mbeki's downfall, ‘Thabo Mbeki: The Fall of Africa's Shakespearean Figure’. Scott Baldauf reports in terms that will become more familiar to us in the next chapter: Mbeki's intelligence, which went together with his aloofness, is contrasted to Zuma's ‘populism’. Not surprisingly, Mbeki's intelligence and aloofness are both associated with Shakespeare, here and elsewhere. What is notable here is that, just as Can Themba and Bloke Modisane explicitly do, and as critics have done with Plaatje, Mbeki self-identifies as a Shakespearean tragic hero. Interviewing his biographer, Mark Gevisser, Baldauf writes:

The article ends on this note, a wholly sympathetic one, which allows Mbeki his identification and his self-expression as a great, if tragically wronged, character. He has been much less sympathetically treated in the media, specifically with regard to his penchant for Shakespeare. Mbeki's association with Shakespeare and its meaning in the popular imagination will be treated in more detail in the following chapter. In this chapter I look in some detail at how the coconut president's notion of the African Renaissance encodes the very revised meaning of coconuttiness I have been offering. It is no coincidence that it took a coconut to activate the notion, given its links to the idea of Renaissance upon which Shakespeare's popular reputation to some extent depends, and to the role of English Literature in developing this idea of Renaissance.