African Yearbook of Rhetoric

During the first ever tour of Commonwealth countries in Africa, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan made his first stopover in Ghana on 5 January 1960.

On 9 January, Macmillan, at a State Dinner organised on his behalf in Accra, made a momentous speech. A speech that is regarded as a rehearsal of a key British foreign policy statement Macmillan was to make a month later in Cape Town. This speech would later be referred to as the “wind of change” speech.

Thabo Mbeki was elected President of the African National Congress (ANC) on 18 December 1997 at the ANC’s 50^th Congress, and that of South Africa on 14 June 1999.In both these capacities, Mbeki’s predecessor was Nelson Mandela – someone on whom a “saintly status had been conferred. While Mandela’s presidency was predicated on nation-building and reconciliation, Mbeki’s was, in large measure, underpinned by South Africa’s socio-economic transformation. He believed that the greatest threat to attaining this goal was racism. Mbeki was therefore of the view that it had to be extirpated. As the country’s President, he had to be at the forefront of this struggle. Racism then became a common thread that ran through Mbeki’s speeches. He seemed to have grasped that – as Mamdani aptly puts it – “[i]f the country needed reconciliation, it also needed social justice”.

This paper endeavours to give a rhetorical analysis of what, in my view, may be regarded as Mbeki’s foundational speeches that quintessentially characterise the prevailing racism debate in South Africa. I will confine my analysis to Mbeki’s speeches in his capacities as President of both the ANC and South Africa, and not delve into his views on racism prior and subsequent to these epochs.

Why should concern about public intellectuals be topical everywhere, not least in South Africa as evident from recent publications by Jonathan Jansen and Themba Mbadlanyana? And why focus on notoriously publicity shy, writer-teacher J. M. Coetzee who Mail & Guardian critic Shaun de Waal once called “the Greta Garbo of South African literature”? What can be gleaned from a disjuncture between “sceptical rationality” and “sincere outrage” that is the subject of Coetzee’s deliberations on censorship, but more importantly what insight can be had from the hauntingly dense narrative. “He and His Man”, read in lieu of the customary address expected of a laureate at the occasion of the prestigious award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm in December 2003? These questions, I suggest, open a window into our current state of the commerce of thinking, into the space of Literature, and of our imagining a place for ourselves in a world ruled by economic rationality and fashioned by celebrity culture; a global world that places insoluble tension between the “intellectual” and the “public”. After all, the ideal of an examined life embodied by Plato’s Socrates that lies at the heart of secular moral authority, is being rapidly drowned in the cross-currents of what Appadurai has called the “five dimensions of global cultural flows” (in form of “ethnoscape, mediascape, technoscape, financescape, and ideoscape”) that define the current “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” as something utterly unprecedented. What Coetzee sets into motion in his Nobel Lecture is the necessary preying “upon the old [stories]” that tend to be swamped by these “flows” in so far as “the young are to be forbidden”, to connect with the (Western) past, having to “sit for ever in silence.”