Return to Sender, Do Not Repeat Order: Nicolas Sarkozy’s Speech at the University of Dakar
Chris Dunton
Yet here perhaps, Sarkozy muses, lies Africa’s strength. After a few comments on prospects for an African Renaissance – which are as vacuous as one might expect – Sarkozy’s sight comes to rest on the example of Senghor. Much of the peroration of his speech, indeed, has a Senghorian ring to it (and this perhaps casts light on some of the rhetorical devices that pervade the earlier parts of the speech, especially the incantatory repetition with variants found in openers such as “The reality of Africa”, “Do you wish that”, “The problem of Africa” and “I have come here to say to you”).The final paragraph of the speech is worth quoting in full:
Well, then, my dear Friends, [I wish to say] only this: Camara Laye’s black child, on his knees in the silence of the African night, knew and appreciated that he could raise his head and gaze at the future with confidence. And this black child of Camara Laye’s felt the two sides of himself become reconciled as one. And he felt himself at last to be a man like all other men within humanity.
This confection almost beggars comment. Two observations might, though, be: first, to ask just how silent was the night around the campus where Sarkozy gave his speech, and second to remark how stunningly ahistorical Sarkozy’s observations are. It is, after all, fifty years since Mongo Beti took Camara Laye to task for the kind of utterances Sarkozy perpetrates here. Sarkozy’s speech is an exemplar of the need – at least as great now as ever before – to unpack rhetorical acts perpetrated on Africa and on the continent’s material realities.Two other examples, briefly.
In South Africa there is an on-going and sometimes bitter debate on the ANC government’s barely concealed preference for “sunshine journalism”, a debate fired recently by ANC spokesperson and columnist Sandile Mamela’s insistence that the responsibility of the media lies in “engendering respect for the current African political leadership.” Newspapers that demonstrate that – while “respect” is a fine thing when applied judiciously – their responsibilities extend more broadly than this, come under fire (though on the whole, muzzling actions are applied with some caution). What is at stake here is whether public discourse should be permitted to float free of empirically determined data. This question applies to a spectacular degree to the current situation in Zimbabwe and was further fuelled back in September by an article by British premier Gordon Brown published in the London Independent.
Brown’s comments are contentious more for what they omit than for what they say: there remains no acknowledgment, for example, of the possibility that the Blair regime’s renunciation of financial responsibility for land compensation might have contributed to the disaster. But the catalogue of crimes listed by Brown is persuasive in a way rhetorical discourse should often not be: in addressing a crisis, raw data regarding bloody wounds may not be sufficient in itself, but they make for a good start. This, in a context in which Gertrude Mongella, President of the Pan-African Parliament, blithely acknowledges that Zimbabwe is experiencing “some problems.”
If sometimes there is nothing to fear but fear itself, then, likewise, we might sometimes act with an awareness of, but also contempt for, the power of rhetoric. When Zimbabwean journalist Basildon Peta notes that some will say Brown’s article “plays into Mugabe’s rhetoric that he is being victimized for empowering his black countrymen” he is undoubtedly correct, but the point is then to launch a full frontal onslaught on that rhetoric.
Maybe Sarkozy and Mugabe should get together – they could teach each other a rhetorical trick or two. “Try working more on your perorations, Bob.” “You need to firm up on your ‘we’ language, young Nick.”
One final point: the word “rhetoric” has, broadly, two applications. It can refer to the art of persuasive speaking, or it can refer to the study and critique of such speaking. In Africa there is a movement towards applying the analytical tools of rhetoric to, for example, the speeches of African leaders, to sermons and to materials such as the Zimbabwe Churches “National Vision” document. A major initiative in this direction has been taken by rhetoricians based at the University of Cape Town, and there is work of a similar kind being carried out by, for example, staff and doctoral students at the National University of Lesotho. If Sarkozy continues to perpetrate acts such as that inflicted on the students of the University of Dakar, he can expect to have his work deconstructed through the tools of this emerging trend in African scholarship.