A Companion to African Rhetoric

Extract

Deemed the flagship of the African Association for Rhetoric (AAR), A companion to African rhetoric gathers seventeen discrete essays by different scholars who have researched and published in the fields of their various contributions. Each of these essays constantly disrupts and queries Western constructions of rhetoric and allows us to (re)define understandings of what is (or is not) African rhetoric. As the book’s editors also acknowledge, rhetoric may not be an African word, ‘but every language on the continent is not short of terms and keywords that can be used to describe rhetoric’ (xii). Segun Ige even points out ‘the place and primacy attributed to the theory of Maat and the instructions of Ptah-Hotep in Western critique of African rhetoric’ which, in his view, places Egyptian rhetoric as ‘the representative form of rhetoric in Africa’ (xvi). The main thrust of the book, therefore, is that there is a form of rhetoric that is wholly African in outlook and orientation.