Contextual Complexities and Nelson Mandela’s Braided Rhetoric by Patricia Ofili A thesis presented to the University of Waterloo in fulfilment of the thesis requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2019 @ Patricia Ofili 2019 Examining Committee Membership The following served on the Examining Committee for this thesis. The decision of the Examining Committee is by majority vote. External Examiner Dr. Geneva Smitherman Professor Emerita Supervisor Dr. Frankie Condon Associate Professor Internal-external Member Dr. James Walker Professor Internal Members Dr. Michael Macdonald Associate Professor Dr. Heather Smyth Associate Professor ii Author’s Declaration I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. iii Dissertation Abstract This dissertation revolves around the complex political circumstances in apartheid South Africa that produced Nelson Mandela the rhetorician, human rights activist, and the longest political prisoner in human history. The manner in which Nelson Mandela deploys a braided rhetoric that is a combination of the African and Western rhetorical traditions for spearheading the anti- apartheid struggle in South Africa is investigated. Mandela draws upon the African rhetorical tradition through which his identity, selfhood, and ethos were forged, while appropriating the Western rhetorical tradition through which he attained his education and training as a lawyer. Also examined is the complexity of inter-ethnic strife among Black South Africans; a situation that was exploited by the apartheid regime and which made the western rhetorical tradition inadequate for addressing apartheid domination. The dissertation also studies Mandela’s dynamism as he navigates the murky waters of apartheid policies, which were not only smoke screens for veiling their racist intent but were enactments that kept morphing for the purpose of crushing any form of dissent. The complex situation produced an audience that was very diverse; and to appeal to these local and international audiences, Mandela required a rhetoric that was nuanced and effective enough to dismantle the apartheid racist order. Mandela employs narratives, which are performed in keeping with the African oral tradition - to unify, organize, and inspire his people; to call on the world beyond the borders of South Africa to account for their support of Apartheid; and to call out whites South Africans for their implicit and explicit consent to the evils of a racist social, political, and economic order. Mandela’s rhetoric is strengthened particularly because, even as he speaks and writes in service of a struggle against systemic racism, he rises above the reification of essentialism and thus resists complicity. iv Acknowledgments I owe a huge debt of gratitude to a lot of people without whom this dissertation could not have become a reality. I would like to thank my thesis supervisor, Frankie Condon, for her relentless support, encouragement, and availability. Her guidance and enthusiasm throughout the various stages of writing this project is invaluable. My sincere gratitude goes also to members of my committee, Michael Macdonald, Heather Smyth, and Shelley Hulan, (for the period she had to step in for my supervisor when she was unavoidable absent). I appreciate all your advice, deep and probing questions, and the countless hours that were devoted to reading my work and providing the much-needed feedback. My appreciation goes to Prof Austin Nwagbara, who was instrumental to my journey to UWaterloo. I would also like to the thank the departmental staff, Tina Davidson, Maha Eid, Jenny Conroy, and Margaret Ulbrick for cheering me on and always being on hand to help. My gratitude goes to John and Roberta North for all their help and support. I am most grateful to my immediate family (you suffered the most from my long absence), my friends (especially my best Tina Egbuiwe and Rasha – my cheerleader) as well as my siblings, who have been my inspiration/pillar and for whom this program is as much an achievement as it is mine. v Dedication This program is dedicated to the Almighty God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit To my Mother Mary And to my mother Lucy vi Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………. 1 Chapter 2: Mandela and Global Human Rights Ideologies………………………………. 51 Chapter 3: Mandela’s Performative Ethos and Kairotic Ontology……………………….106 Chapter 4: Apartheid’s Legal Screens and Mandela’s Luminescence…………………….160 Chapter 5: Peace on a More Solid Ground…………………………………………………208 Bibliography and Works Cited……………………………………………………………...255 vii Chapter One Introduction My dissertation examines the manner in which Nelson Mandela employs a braided rhetoric within a complex socio-political context, as a strategy for dismantling apartheid. I describe braided rhetoric as the weaving together of both the Western and African rhetorical traditions. African rhetorical tradition refers to the entire system of artistic forms – visual, oral, and written, which are employed to celebrate and inculcate the African culture. These forms are employed within Africa and in the diaspora in ways that are highly persuasive. The Western rhetorical tradition is employed to describe the Greco-Roman canon with its tropes, figures, and symbols that form a system for persuasively inculcating, celebrating, and disseminating Western culture. This Western system of communication, with its derogative depiction of other races, formed the foundation for justifying imperialism, which in turn helped to produce racist apartheid. Apartheid was predicated on systemic and institutional racism, which was deployed to fragment Blacks in South Africa. Therefore, as a resistance leader, Mandela required a unique and complex rhetorical system in order to bring unity to these Blacks. Mandela’s braided rhetoric provided him with the rhetorical tools needed to appeal to the cultural commonality of these Blacks, whose ethnic differences had been effectively exploited by the ruling racial order to divide and weaken them. Not only were South Africans divided culturally and linguistically, competing anti- imperialist and anti-racist ideologies that shaped their strategies for resistance movements also separated them. Further, other South African people of colour, whose vested interests differed from those of Blacks, were alienated from those resistance movements even as they, too, were exploited by the ruling racial order. Finally, any resistance by whites, who may have opposed the worst excesses of the Apartheid regime, was kept in check both by the political hegemony of Apartheid 1 and by the privileges bestowed on them by that regime. Thus, Mandela took on the onerous task of uniting Blacks, in order to produce a cohesive resistance to apartheid. He also attempted to bridge the gap between Blacks, other people of colour, and sympathetic whites within and beyond South Africa. To achieve all of these, he required a unique political rhetoric that could be strategic, adaptive, fierce, and reflexive. Mandela’s braided rhetoric is peculiar because he cultivates a style that has been criticized as not being as captivating as that of other human rights rhetors like Martin Luther King, Jr. However, the subtlety of Mandela’s rhetoric enables his words to cut deep particularly because he employs a variety of rhetorical devices and by his recognition of the complex audience he needed to persuade. Previous scholars have examined Nelson Mandela’s political rhetoric in the context of his human right activism and revolutionary leadership as evidence of his standing as a legal luminary. Jacques Derrida, for example, examines the manner by which Mandela deconstructs the apartheid legal framework to reveal how the Whites of South Africa violate their own legal heritage. Peace and conflict studies scholar, Tom Lodge, argues that Mandela’s success as a leader was determined by the principles he absorbed from his cultural settings. These principles were strengthened by a literary culture that combined African oral traditions with Victorian concepts of honor, propriety, and virtue. Elleke Boehmer, a scholar of postcolonial literature, describes Mandela as a moral giant and an exemplar of a stand for social justice, non-racialism, and democracy. Building upon and extending this prior scholarship, my dissertation examines the depth and nuance of Nelson Mandela’s political rhetoric as he sought to articulate both dissent and social vision within a fractured and conflict-ridden rhetorical context. Through a close reading of Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom and his speeches, I undertake to examine the 2 deep historical knowledge Mandela had of the political, cultural, and social dynamics of apartheid in South Africa and how he used that knowledge in the resistance movement. In addition, Mandela’s rhetoric is examined to show what role his African roots played for laying bare the imperialist underpinnings from the vantage point of apartheid’s subjugated and resisting subjects. Mandela deploys his braided rhetoric to craft a counter-history of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa. Mandela’s account of the effects of colonialism and apartheid connects strongly to Frantz Fanon’s psychological examination of colonization. Mandela crafts this counter-history by recovering the traditional ethos of