African Yearbook of Rhetoric

What should we be thinking, or what passes for thinking without running around barking, about the violent and sustained contradistinction between the Yellow Vests movement and state powers, led by the diminutive President Macron?

I stated clearly, right after the final round of the presidential elections, that I would neither rally to the cause of Marine Le Pen, captain of the parliamentary extreme right, nor to Macron, who was leading a “democratic coup d’état”, as a pseudo-reformer at the behest of Big Capital.

Introduction

Here come the eagles. There go the locusts. The sky delivers the hand of God as well as fallen angels on their Hell-bound descent. We welcome the spring sunshine, and shelter from the cyclones. Rain gives life while space junk burns through the stratosphere. From above comes the invisible hand of capitalism, apportioning wealth and destitution, and manufacturing privileged oases alongside toxic ruins. Airplanes deliver emergency food-aid and tons of bombs. Gods and monsters dwell in deep space, so in the sky, as on earth, humanity can greet its most perfected and horrendous mutations. And from our airspace descends the topic of this article – drones. Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles [UAVs], deliver figurative payloads that interconnect the political, religious, capitalistic, visual and visceral global society.

Introduction

In March 2003, the Iraq War began with an assault on Baghdad. The United States-led coalition assembled quickly on the heels of the 9/11 attacks, made possible in part by the broad military authority Congress delegated to President George W. Bush. The composite case for the invasion in the United States included claims that Iraq was actively developing weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq was cooperating with al- Qaeda, and that Iraq was a dictatorship that should be overthrown. The war produced worldwide opposition based on the speed with which the United States built the case, the seeming cavalier attitude that the coalition had toward human life (embodied in the Shock and Awe campaign and the conversion of ‘most wanted Iraqis’ into a deck of playing cards), and the suspicion of ulterior motives such as the establishment of Western power projection and easier access to oil. In short, it appeared that the United States was (charitably) taking indiscriminate vengeance or (uncharitably) exercising its imperial ambitions.

Introduction

It is a notorious fact that South African legal culture, underpinned as it is by a resilient mode of legal education that holds tenaciously to roots grown over the past 70 years, is extremely conservative.¹ Generations of law students have been told that the objective of legal education is that students must be taught to think like lawyers. In effect, that means that a law student must embrace a recognised and legitimate mode of reasoning and argument, one that can determine the source of legal authority, and adhere to expression that is restrained and subservient to established legal hierarchy. As Peter Goodrich has observed: ”If there was to be any empirical study of law, it was to be that of the objects of legal regulation, of the market, of economic actors and actions defined in terms of ideal types, rational action and pervasively hypothetical situations.”²

1. These were strange words, for which there was little time and about which there was not much to say. One week before the 1994 election, the election, South Africa’s Mail & Guardian (backed by BP Southern Africa and the Anglo American Corporation) presented its readers with an “easy-to-read guide” on the new Constitution—“our document,” it declared, one “forged for our specific needs on the anvil of tough and lengthy negotiations.” Such a guide was necessary, the paper suggested, as it was difficult to find a copy of this “immensely important document” that “gives ordinary people powers, rights, protections that they have never had before.” Noting that the Constitution had yet only been published in two languages and launched without the benefit of a media campaign, the paper contended that it was a “vital document that is too little understood”. Its terms, details, and ambiguities—the “Constitution is not perfect”—needed to be grasped by “ordinary citizens”.¹