The ‘Recalcitrant Other’ The Rhetorical Identity and Struggle of Nelson Mandela

38 AfricA insight Vol 44(1) – June 2014 © Africa Institute of South Africa

Abstract

South Africa’s colonial and apartheid politics of space is the exigency that inspired the struggle rhetoric of Nelson Mandela. Mandela’s rhetorical struggle was premised on archetypal content and in particular the rhetorical imprint articulated as a perilous symbolic journey. The rhetorical imprint is a complex conceptual structure governing thought and message production and is a function of Mandela’s rhetorical struggle and identity. This article explores the complexity of Mandela’s rhetorical identity as the Recalcitrant Other and his rhetorical struggle as informed by contesting influences such as his ancestral birthright, cultural upbringing, British mission education, and exposure to a racially constructed hegemonic order. By subversively drawing on his anglophile tendencies, he defied both Empire and the apartheid regime, but without denying his cultural roots.

Introduction

This article unpacks the interplay of identity construction and rhetoric within a colonial setting with the aim of understanding the nature of struggle through a very specific case study, the strug-gle rhetoric of Nelson Mandela from 1950 until his incarceration in 1964 after the Rivonia Trial. Given the broader context of the struggle movement, the study corpus represents the rhetorical genre of social movement rhetoric. The source of othering in colonial South Africa was derived from the rhetorically powerful colonial discourses of difference between the Self and the Other, but the article contends that it also served as the wellspring for Nelson Mandela’s rhetorical identity, conceptualised as the Recalcitrant Other, which became the driving force of his rhetorical struggle.

The ‘dialectic between Self and Other’ is indicative of a colonial bond that shackled the colon-iser and the colonised into an ‘implacable dependence’ that constructed identities and configured

The ‘Recalcitrant Other’The Rhetorical Identity and

Struggle of Nelson Mandela

stephanie cawoodProgramme Director and Lecturer at the Centre for Africa Studies University of the Free State, South Africa

Africa Insight 44 (1).indb 38 11/7/2014 3:07:15 PM

39© Africa Institute of South Africa AfricA insight Vol 44(1) – June 2014

The ‘Recalcitrant Other’ – The Rhetorical Identity and Struggle of Nelson Mandela | Stephanie Cawood

behaviour.1 This implies a direct and mutual link between identity and agency and, in terms of this article, between rhetorical identity and rhetorical agency. The dysfunctional colonial interdepend-ence on which South African colonial society was premised was racially based and locked the colonisers and colonised into an aristocracy of colour, with white supremacy as the dominant Self and black invisibleness as the subjugated Other.2

In rhetorical studies, a rhetorical act is controlled by the rhetorical situation, which convention-ally includes the exigency, audiences and constraints on the rhetor.3 In this case, the focus is not on a single rhetorical act, but rather on a specific body of rhetoric. The exigency of the encom-passing rhetorical situation is the particular South African socio-political context of the first half of the twentieth century. In fact, the subjugation experienced under colonial and then apartheid South Africa and the concomitant tendency to ‘depict blacks as of an inferior status’ are, together, considered the exigency or controlling need which prompted Mandela’s rhetorical struggle.4 The rhetorical audience is a complex body of immediate and symbolic audiences addressed by Mandela during the struggle period, for instance the apartheid state, fellow activists, other continental movements, the international community, and white and black South Africans, while Mandela was constrained as Other by the legislation and censorship of the segregationist political and statutory systems of the time.

The system of racial othering that became synonymous with apartheid South Africa was the product of British colonial structures and notions of cultural and racial superiority of Self in con-trast to the otherness of the colonised. British imperial segregation provided the framework for apartheid and represents the spatial manifestation of othering.5 Urban development in the British Empire followed a ‘highly pragmatic approach’ of segregation that rendered space in colonial socie-ties ‘borderlands of ethnic deprivation’, with South Africa being a prime example.6 Insidious colonial processes of political control, economic manipulation and enforced cultural assimilation uprooted indigenous inhabitants and forced them to become an enchained proletariat – the colonised Other. South Africa therefore represented a space of both installation and interpellation where racialised social engineering rearranged the landscape and identities were made and performed.7

It is within this landscape that Nelson Mandela subversively assumed the rhetorical identity of Recalcitrant Other, derived from key sources of identity construction in his life. As Recalcitrant Other, Mandela subversively accepted his otherness as a mode of resistance and rhetorically re-sisted the persuasive discursive othering inherent to colonial discourses.

Sources of the Recalcitrant Other Identity

Nelson Mandela’s struggle is viewed as a consequence of his upbringing in the context of British colonial rule in South Africa. His rebellion against racial oppression and white supremacy already began during the last years of Empire, and his struggle for liberation would continue under the new Afrikaner hegemonic order of the apartheid state. While othering in colonial South Africa lay in its binary dynamics of Self and Other, it was also the source of the subversive rhetorical identity as the Recalcitrant Other. Mandela’s rhetorical identity was both autobiographically and rhetori-cally constructed, and blurred the lines between the private man and public persona.




The Recalcitrant Other is a ‘trans-cultured’ or hybrid identity that is the product of a mutually productive cultural exchange between various domains of difference and is born of the border-lands in South African urban and rural apartheid geographies, i.e. the reserves, homelands and group areas.8 It means being ‘Other-wise’, deliberately accepting the Other and appropriating the hegemonic colonial trappings of language and culture for subversive purposes.9 In his portraits of the coloniser and colonised, Memmi differentiated between the coloniser-who-refuses and the coloniser-who-accepts.10 Nelson Mandela’s rhetorical identity as the Recalcitrant Other paints an-other portrait: the colonised-who-refuses.

The colonised-who-refuses is aware of the nature of his (or her) own subjugation – of his other-ness. Memmi’s mythical portrait of the colonised actually described a colonised-who-submits and how the oppressed colluded in their oppression in the colonial relationship, but at the heart of this coloniser-colonised dialectic, Memmi inadvertently buttressed the colonial stereotype of the industrious coloniser.11 The coloniser is endowed with agency, illustrated by the nuanced charac-terisation of the coloniser-who-refuses and the coloniser-who-accepts.

The agency of the colonised is underdeveloped and, where present, of a more passive nature. In its undifferentiated form, Memmi’s portrait of the colonised as one who submits to colonialism cannot account for Nelson Mandela’s high level of agency as struggle activist, which required a more nuanced consideration of colonised subjects who deliberately defied their own subjugation. Mandela’s rhetorical identity as the Recalcitrant Other is premised on a number of key sources taken from his life that overlap and interact, but for the sake of the discussion are teased apart and include interstitial cultural domains, leadership style, rebelling against the comfort of the familiar, linking ideology and agency, and applying pragmatism in national liberation.

Nelson Mandela’s identity was forged among divergent interstitial cultural domains. While his upbringing was rural and traditional, his education in the Wesleyan mission education system was unashamedly British and anglophile. He was born and grew up in rural Transkei as part of the Thembu royal house of the Xhosa nation, a dignified people with a social order based on courtesy, education and laws, which revolved around clans and a proud tribal tradition. The area of his birth was designated a native reserve by the British during the conflicts between local inhabitants and British settlers on the Eastern frontier – a material and symbolic borderland. The land was state-owned, as Africans by that time had already been denied property rights under the 1913 Native Land Act.12

Like any other child, Mandela quickly assimilated the rules of his culture, but after his mother’s conversion to the Christian faith and his baptism in the local Wesleyan Methodist Church he would also assimilate the rules of British culture in the Wesleyan mission education system. As part of his British education, the young Mandela was also given an English name, Nelson, a name he embraced and which serves as a symbol of his appreciation for British culture and institutions, particularly the British parliamentary system.13 Mandela reviled the insidious nature of British imperialism, but continued to admire the idea of the dignified and courteous English gentleman, as is evident from his 1994 autobiography where he explicitly stated, ‘While I abhorred the notion of British imperialism, I never rejected the trappings of British style and manners’.14

Mandela’s appropriation and use of the culture and language of the British Empire are read as a sign not of his colonised condition, but of his subversion of white supremacy and statutory




segregation from the inside.15 His mastering of colonial culture is not unique, but shared by con-temporaries such as Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, who likewise enjoyed the finer things of English culture while being doggedly anti-colonial at the same time.16 This recalcitrant cannibalising of colonial culture is a deliberate closing of the gap opened up and emphasised in colonial South Africa, by creating a symbolic space for confronting colonial authority and the invisibleness of the oppressed face to face.

The English language became a tool for subverting Afrikaner notions of cultural and racial superiority in resistance to the apartheid regime and its anti-British zeal. For Mandela, cultural assimilation was not colonial inevitability, but an expression of his postcoloniality, his subjective subversion of imperialising/colonising.17 He used the English language as a pragmatic strategy for struggle, not as passive mimicry of colonial culture but to ‘carry the weight of his African experi-ence’.18 Both Fanon and Said recognised that the colonial language that constructed the discourses of othering could be used to similarly subvert the colonial hegemon.19

The Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) and Steve Biko would later come to regard cultural assimilation as a source of alienation and eternal subordination, but rather than being a sign of submission to colonial power, for Memmi assimilation is the opposite of colonisation as ‘It tends to eliminate the distinctness between the colonizers and the colonized, and thereby eliminates the colonial relationship’.20 It would be a mistake to equate national unity with unisonance, for ‘mastering the language of the Other’ is not a sign of cultural ambivalence of Self, but a natural and expected step towards leadership in postcolonial hybridised societies with great capacity for creating solidarity.21 In this way, Mandela pursued assimilation as a means to refine his political values and thinking, as articulated in his opening statement from the dock at the Rivonia Trial on 20 April 1964:

I have been influenced in my thinking by both West and East. All this has led me to feel that in my search

for a political formula, I should be absolutely impartial and objective. I should tie myself to no particular

system of society other than [that] of socialism. I must leave myself free to borrow the best from the West

and from the East.22

Mandela’s leadership style is often likened to that of a shepherd leading from behind. He recounts how he realised early in his childhood how important it is to avoid inflicting humiliation on an opponent. The principles of honour and dignity in victory were deeply instilled in the mind of the young man.23 Under the guardianship of Chief Jongintaba, reputed to be fair-minded and disci-plined, a young Mandela witnessed the importance of consensus in leadership. Both his childhood experiences and his background as attorney instilled in Mandela an understanding of the value of dialogue for co-operative relations.24 He described the influence of his upbringing as follows:

As a leader, I have always followed the principles I first saw demonstrated by the regent at the Great Place.

I have always endeavoured to listen to what each and every person in a discussion ha[s] to say before

venturing my own opinion. Oftentimes, my own opinion will simply represent a consensus of what I heard

in the discussion. I always remember the regent’s axiom: a leader, he said, is like a shepherd.25




The rhetorical identity of the Recalcitrant Other already manifested in Mandela’s youth and is best illustrated by an incident at the University College of Fort Hare and an act of rebellion that would set him on his path of political struggle. One year shy of attaining his bachelor’s degree, Mandela was up for election on the student representative council (SRC). The majority of the stu-dent body boycotted the elections to protest the diet and the lack of power of the SRC, and Mandela was elected to the SRC in absentia by the few students who cast their ballots. Because the majority of the student body did not vote, the six elected to the SRC resigned.26

In a repeat vote, the same six students were once again elected. While Mandela remained firm and resigned once again, the other five students accepted the outcome. Mandela’s defiance led to his expulsion from Fort Hare, which greatly displeased Chief Jongintaba. When Chief Jongintaba subsequently informed Mandela that a marriage had been arranged for him, he left for Johannesburg in April 1941, leaving behind the comfort and protection of familiar surroundings where his position was one of limited privilege and his role clearly defined.27

The comfort of the familiar, apart from its coercive role, is conceptualised in this article as a major source of the compliance of the colonised-who-submits with his or her own subjugation and inertia. The racialised hierarchical structure of colonial society with different levels of privilege and punishment reserved for different ‘castes’, coupled with the dehumanising racialised discourses of othering, created a comforting familiarity and inertia regarding one’s position in colonial society, whether out of fear of losing the limited privileges you were allowed access to, or whether out of fear for retaliation.28 The Recalcitrant Other as the ‘colonised who refuses colonialism’ moved beyond the realm of fear to refuse his or her condition of subjugation as well as the comfort of the familiar.

Mandela’s willingness to sacrifice the comfort of the familiar is also illustrated by his decision to leave his family and home surroundings to help organise the ANC from the underground after the Sharpeville massacre on 21 March 1960 and the subsequent banning of the ANC and PAC. In spite of the fact that any form of resistance from then on constituted a criminal offense with seri-ous punitive consequences, Mandela embarked on the unknown path of covert resistance.29

The Recalcitrant Other also represents an intersection between ideology and agency. Mandela’s agency in the liberation struggle was closely related to his ideology. Any change in his ideology would be reflected in his actions. After the beginning of his political career in the early 1940s, Mandela’s political consciousness rapidly developed into an African nationalism more radical than that of the ANC. Along with other youthful Africanists,30 he believed that the ANC had become the domain of a privileged and docile African elite, and he was instrumental in the establishment of the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) in 1944 to revitalise the organisation and encourage mass action. In this instance, Mandela acted on his ideology to help radicalise the African nationalism of the ANC through the establishment of the ANCYL.

At the time of the ANCYL’s establishment, Mandela described his ideological outlook as staunchly Africanist and anti-communist.31 After the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act, how-ever, Mandela became convinced of the necessity of a united, multi-racial struggle inclusive of communism.32 His change in ideology would be reflected in his role as primary driver of black resistance during the 1950s in events such as the 1950 stay-at-home and the 1952 Defiance Campaign, where he was chief volunteer.33 His political agency intensified during the 1950s, when




he developed an operational strategy for the ANC in the event of proscription and helped mobilise resistance against the ‘black spot’ removals, while maintaining connections with the tribal leader-ship in rural Transkei.34

On 8 April 1960, the apartheid government banned both the ANC and the PAC, which drove the resistance movement underground and led to the creation of a militant wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), with Nelson Mandela as chairman of the High Command. Non-violent resistance had ended, and the ANC decided to continue the struggle through the armed resistance of MK.35 From the time of the banning of the ANC until his arrest in 1962, Mandela maintained his agency and continued his clandestine activities, which earned him the moniker of the Black Pimpernel.36 His agency as the Black Pimpernel articulated his ideological progression from passive resistance to armed struggle and sabotage.

Apart from his mentioned ideological development, Mandela’s approach to national liberation was also deeply pragmatic. He recognised when the time had come to proceed from moderation and passive resistance to more violent means of struggle. Mandela understood that ‘the only cure for the pathological condition that colonisation inflicts on coloniser and colonised alike is national liberation’ and that successful national liberation would require revolution.37 Sabotage represented the pragmatic use of violence and the essential antidote required for the dissolution of calcified colonial structures. Both Fanon and Memmi recognised the inevitability of violent struggle. For Fanon, the violence of the colonised will always be commensurate with the violence of the colonial regime and has the power to revive the self-respect of the colonised.38

The Rhetorical Struggle of Nelson Mandela

The significance of Nelson Mandela’s rhetorical struggle is shaped by his rhetorical identity as Recalcitrant Other, moulded in turn by the rhetorical situation. In rhetorical studies, identity and rhetoric are linked, and the impact of a particular speech is determined by the credibility of the speaker.39 It was the moral authority derived from his identity which legitimised his struggle rheto-ric and gave it so much gravitas. He re-scripted the colonial relationship between coloniser and colonised through his rhetorical struggle, which formed an integral part of the liberation struggle and is considered to belong to the rhetorical genre of social movement rhetoric.

Rhetorical genres conventionally refer to Aristotle’s differentiation between deliberative (po-litical), judicial (forensic) and epideictic (ceremonial) rhetoric.40 Mandela’s struggle rhetoric, indeed most contemporary real-world rhetoric, contains elements from all these genres and is generically hybridised.41 Generic criticism in relation to social movements provides a more productive analy-sis of genre in this case, as the liberation struggle is viewed as a social movement with its own distinct genre of rhetoric.42 More specifically, Mandela’s struggle rhetoric can be categorised as dissent where the aim was to agitate for racial equality by constantly and resolutely publicly dis-seminating the grievances of black South Africans.43 His struggle rhetoric is unpacked in terms of its underlying structure and content, his cultural roots, rhetorical resistance, and intertextuality.

Nelson Mandela’s struggle rhetoric is patterned on an underlying structure called the rhetori-cal imprint that resembles a perilous, symbolic journey, and is the distinctive underlying mental




model whose nature determines both the structure and content of thought and communication.44 Carl Jung expressed this idea of basic unchanging patterns of experience in the unconscious mind as archetypes with symbols as their visible representations.45 Specific archetypal symbols can be derived from individual or cultural experience and commonly occur as paired opposites such as male and female, light and dark, or life and death. Certain archetypal symbols are believed to be extremely powerful because they tap into widely shared forms of human experience, for instance the daily cycle of light and dark that represents the passage of time.

In rhetorical studies, conceptual metaphors function similarly to Jung’s archetypes, as they are grounded in prominent forms of human experience, objects, actions, or conditions like life and death. Since they are inspired by basic and unchanging aspects of being human, conceptual metaphors are known to have great effect on audiences across generations and cultures and are extremely popular in rhetorical discourse because of their persuasive potential. Where rhetorical situations include times of turmoil such as war, orators are known to subconsciously favour this kind of metaphor and imagery, as it speaks directly to a shared and inescapably fragile human condition under threat from whatever crisis is at hand. As a consequence, rhetoric produced under crisis conditions is intense and deterministic, the situation is simplified and conditional factors are employed.46

In his struggle rhetoric, Nelson Mandela describes the tumultuous rhetorical situation in South Africa when colonialism transformed into apartheid and tended to represent the struggle for lib-eration as an arduous, violent journey on foot towards a destination of freedom (or victory), e.g. ‘no easy walk to freedom’ or ‘long walk to freedom’.47 The notion of undertaking a journey is a fundamental human experience and therefore a powerful source of imagery in conceptual meta-phorical language that has the potential to be understood by all people. In an article titled ‘People are destroyed’, published in the journal Liberation in October 1955, Nelson Mandela once again presented the struggle as a journey on foot: ‘Lynchings and pogroms are the logical weapons to be resorted to, should the onward march of the liberation movement continue to manifest itself’.48

The perilous symbolic journey is a mythical quest undertaken by a symbolic hero or, in this case, Mandela as the Recalcitrant Other. On this quest, the hero is expected to meet obstacles, to battle enemies and temptation, or to take detours. The journey can be subject to interruptions or setbacks as challenges are faced along the way. Predictably, the concept of struggle is the pre-dominant motif throughout Mandela’s struggle rhetoric. The term ‘struggle’ implies adversity over a period of time. This image is further strengthened by his use of the present continuous tense, indicating a process or journey that, while it has already commenced, is still ongoing and will continue into the future.

The concept of a journey is a manifestation of an underlying pattern where change will come about through a process. A journey is never static and by definition represents a forward progres-sion. The quest for liberation in his struggle rhetoric is twofold: First, it is the journey of Mandela himself – a path, which by birth and circumstance he is destined to walk; and second, it is the jour-ney towards freedom for all oppressed people, whether South African, African or from elsewhere in the world.

Progression is further implied by the constant use of words and phrases such as ‘movement’, ‘march’ and ‘at the outset’. The outcome or destination of the journey is already decided. Victory




is inevitable, although the path towards it may be long and dangerous. For Mandela there was no doubt that the struggle for liberation would succeed, and his rhetoric is accordingly deterministic. In 1962, he addressed the Conference of the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa, or PAFMECA, in Addis Ababa by saying,

I should assure you that the African people of South Africa, notwithstanding fierce persecution and untold

suffering, in their ever increasing courage will not for one single moment be diverted from the historic

mission of liberating their country...49

This determinism is further illustrated by his conceptualisation that on ‘the long walk to freedom’, the armed struggle was unavoidable.

The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices – submit or fight. That time

has now come to South Africa. We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means in

our power in defence of our people, our future, and our freedom. 50

Mandela articulated an adversarial relationship between the colonisers as Other and the colonised as Self, where he juxtaposed the oppressed people of Africa with the colonial and capitalistic oppressors:

In Africa the colonial powers – Great Britain, Portugal, France, Italy, Spain, and their servitors in South

Africa – are attempting with the help of the notorious American ruling class to maintain colonial rule and

oppression... In thinking of the direct enemies of the African people, namely Great Britain, Spain, France,

Portugal, Italy and South Africa, we must never forget the indirect enemy…51

He saw his own life as a perilous symbolic journey, issuing on 26 June 1961, while he was operat-ing as the Black Pimpernel from the underground, a press statement titled The struggle is my life to that effect:

For my own part I have made my choice. I will not leave South Africa, nor will I surrender. Only through

hardship, sacrifice, and militant action can freedom be won. The struggle is my life. I will continue fighting

for freedom until the end of my days.52

Mandela’s Xhosa cultural upbringing was also evident in his struggle rhetoric. The Xhosa tribe has a strong oral tradition of heroic myth and agency, oral poetry, folktales and wisdom-lore in which Mandela was steeped since childhood. The oral traditions of his youth were crystallised in his rhetoric every time he evoked his ancestral heroes – the mighty worriers of the folktales learnt at mother’s knee – as illustrated in his speech at the Rivonia Trial.

In my youth in the Transkei, I listened to the elders of my tribe telling stories of the old days. Amongst the

tales they related to me were those of wars fought by our ancestors in defence of the fatherland. The names

of Dingane and Bambata, Hintsa and Makana, Squngthi and Dalasile, Moshoeshoe and Sekhukhuni, were




praised as the glory of the entire African nation. I hoped then that life might offer me the opportunity

to serve my people and make my own humble contribution to their freedom struggle. This is what has

motivated me in all that I have done in relation to the charges made against me in this case.53

While constrained by statutory segregation during the struggle era, Mandela used the platforms available to him to symbolically resist the apartheid government and their ideology of white su-premacy. He used his testimony and court statements in the Treason Trial (1956–1960); his first court statement in the 1962 trial for inciting a riot and leaving the country illegally; and his state-ment from the dock at the start of the defence case in the Rivonia Trial (1964) as rhetorical acts of dissent in social movement rhetoric to morally discredit apartheid and to convey the ideals of the ANC and the liberation struggle. In his 1962 court statement, he boldly declared the following:

Some time during the progress of these proceedings, I hope to be able to indicate that this case is a trial of

the aspirations of the African people, and because of that I thought it proper to conduct my own defence.54

At the start of the defence case in the Rivonia Trial on 20 April 1964, Mandela elected to make a statement from the dock instead of testifying and submitting to cross-examination, although the latter is legally more valuable. He explained his reasoning in this regard.

We believed it was important to open the defence with a statement of our politics and ideals… it was more

important that I use the platform to highlight our grievances.55

Mandela was also inspired by the independence struggles of other countries during decolonisa-tion, and their iconic protagonists. His admiration for Jawaharlal Nehru, first Prime Minister of independent India, is evident, considering that the adage most associated with Mandela, a long walk or march to freedom, is a product of intertextuality. In his speech titled No Easy Walk to Freedom delivered on 21 September 1953 in his capacity as Transvaal President of the ANC at its regional conference, Mandela echoed the words of Nehru taken from an article titled From Lucknow to Tripuri.56

You can see that there is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the

valley of the shadow (of death) again and again before we reach the mountain tops of our desires. Dangers

and difficulties have not deterred us in the past, they will not frighten us now. But we must be prepared for

them like men in business who do not waste energy in vain talk and idle action. The way of preparation

(for action) lies in our rooting out all impurity and indiscipline from our organisation and making it the

bright and shining instrument that will cleave its way to (Africa’s) freedom.57

There is no easy walk-over to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of

the shadow again and again before we reach the mountain-tops of our desire. Dangers and difficulties have

not deterred us in the past; they will not frighten us now. But we must be prepared for them like men who

mean business and who do not waste their energy in vain talk and idle action. The way of preparation lies




in our rooting out all impurity and indiscipline from our organization and making it the bright and shining

instrument that will cleave its way to India’s freedom.58

Both Nehru and Mandela echo Martin Luther King, Jr in their allusion to a biblical landscape. Here, the landscape that has to be traversed on the arduous journey to freedom is a biblical landscape where the valley is despair and the fulfilment of desires is represented by the mountain tops. In the iconic speech titled I have a Dream, delivered on 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr juxtaposed a valley, as indicative of despair, with a mountain, as indicative of the fulfilment of desires or the attainment of freedom.59 King also utilised the depiction of the mountaintop as the attainment of desires in his speech titled I have seen the Promised Land, delivered on 3 April 1968.60

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair...From every mountainside, let freedom ring (From: I have a

Dream).61

Because I’ve been to the mountaintop... I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the

mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land (From: I have seen the Promised Land).62

In his reliance on archetypal content, Mandela’s rhetoric is not unlike Winston Churchill’s mythic rhetoric.63 Both rhetors responded to turbulent times by rhetorically constructing a struggle against an evil force, even though they stood on different sides of the colonial divide. The intertextuality of Mandela’s speeches with those of Winston Churchill lies in the use of the archetypal source domains of light versus dark and a journey, as well as in their tendency to personify political and ideological opponents as villains, while depicting organisations, concepts and ideas related to their position as heroes or victims in what is known as the Warrior Iconography.64

In this iconography, Churchill posed Britain as a hero, with Germany being the villain, while Mandela cast the apartheid government and white supremacy (racialism) as villains, the African people and country as victims, and the ANC and ANCYL as heroes and warriors in this colonial drama. The hero-villain binary relied on by both Churchill and Mandela is an extension of othering discourses where the hero is represented as the Self and the villain as the Other. In his rhetorical struggle, Mandela therefore countered colonial discourses of othering by subversively positioning the apartheid government and the ideology of white supremacy as Other.

Conclusion

Nelson Mandela’s rhetorical struggle was intimately intertwined with his rhetorical identity as Recalcitrant Other. It was the moral authority derived from this identity that validated his strug-gle rhetoric and made it so significant. His defiance was inspired by his trans-cultured identity and the ease with which he moved between different cultural domains, depending on context. His moral authority was a function of his ability to pragmatically transform his ideology into agency. Mandela’s rhetorical identity as Recalcitrant Other made him an effective driver of political




resistance during the 1950s, and the relative success of events such as the Defiance Campaign can be directly attributed to his rhetorical identity.

The struggle rhetoric of Mandela defied colonial discourses of othering and was shaped by a rhetorical imprint conceptually configured according to archetypal journey iconography. The basic unchanging patterns of human experience in the form of archetypes such as life versus death, light versus dark or the journey motif have the power to transcend individual and cultural differences and are prevalent during turbulent times. Mandela’s struggle rhetoric shared particular points of convergence with Winston Churchill’s use of archetypal content and structure, even though they stood on opposite sides of the colonial gulf. Both used Warrior Iconography to represent opponents as villains or the Other and themselves and their allies as heroes.

Mandela subversively used the binary discursive formation of colonial othering as rhetorical re-sistance. He successfully turned the colonised-coloniser dialectical relationship of Other in relation to Self on its head to rhetorically represent the struggle as a narrative of African nationalism con-testing the othering discourses of white supremacy. Mandela’s rhetorical identity as Recalcitrant Other would continue into liberation and democracy primarily in relation to his HIV/Aids activism, while his rhetorical identity and struggle in the political sphere devolved into the iconic Reconciler-in-Chief during his presidency.

The exploration of the powerful and persuasive nature of othering that determined colonial power relations between the coloniser and colonised proved to be a useful analytic tool in explor-ing the dynamics of rhetorical identity and struggle in the case of one of the icons of the South African liberation struggle. The combination of rhetorical studies and postcolonialism has great interdisciplinary potential for studying the persuasive power of colonial discourses of othering as well as the rhetorical resistance of liberation movements and activists.

Notes and References1 Memmi, A., 1965. The colonizer and the colonized. Boston: Beacon Press, pp.ix–xvii; Memmi, A., 1973. The impossible life of Frantz Fanon. The

Massachusetts Review, 14(1), pp.9–39.

2 Bhabha, H.K., 1994. The location of culture. London: Routledge, p.47.

3 Rybacki, K. & Rybacki, D., 1991. Communication criticism: Approaches and genres. California: Wadsworth, p.23.

4 Biko, S.B., 2002. Black Consciousness and the quest for a true humanity. In P.H. Coetzee & A.P.J. Roux (eds.), The African philosophy reader (2ed.). London: Routledge, p.82; Cawood, S., 2011. The rhetorical imprint of Nelson Mandela as reflected by public speeches: 1950 – 2004 (Doctoral thesis). Bloemfontein: University of the Free State, pp. 17–19.

5 Terreblanche, S., 2002. A history of inequality in South Africa: 1652 – 2002. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, p.281; Giliomee, H. & Mbenga, B. (eds.), 2007. Nuwe geskiedenis van Suid-Afrika. Cape Town: Tafelberg, p.231.

6 Christopher, A.J., 1992. Urban segregation levels in the British overseas empire and its successors in the twentieth century. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (New Series), 17(1), pp.95–7,105.; Bhabha, H.K., 1994, pp.2–3.

7 Bhabha, H.K., 1994, p.9; Terreblanche, S., 2002, pp.5–6, 158.

8 Coombes, A.E., 1994. The recalcitrant object: culture contact and the question of hybridity. In F. Barker, P. Hulme & M. Iversen (eds.), Colonial discourse/postcolonial theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, p.89; Bhabha, H.K., 1994, pp.6–7.

9 Bhabha, H.K., 1994, p.64.

10 Memmi, A., 1965, p.19.

11 Ibid, p.88.




12 Mandela, N.R., 2006. Mandela: the authorised portrait. Highlands North: Wild Dog Press, p.13; Mandela, N.R., 1994. Long walk to freedom. London: Abacus, p.4.

13 Mandela, N.R., 1994, pp.15–16, 57–60.

14 Ibid, p.360.

15 Mandela would use the Afrikaans language and culture in the same way to create common ground with the white Afrikaans-speaking minority after his release from prison, as a means of creating common ground to foster reconciliation.

16 Gikandi, S., 2001. Cultural translation and the African self: A (Post)colonial case study. Interventions, 3(3), pp.355–75.

17 Loomba, A., 1998. Colonialism/postcolonialism (2ed.). London: Routledge, p.16.

18 See Chinua Achebe in Loomba, A., 1998, p.80.

19 Said, E.W., 2001. Power, politics and culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said. London: Bloomsbury, p.30.

20 Memmi, A., 1965, p.150; Biko, S.B., 2002. Black Consciousness and the quest for a true humanity. In: P.H. Coetzee and A.P.J. Roux (eds.). The African philosophy reader (2ed.). London: Routledge, pp.79–85.

21 Bhabha, H.K., 1994, p.94; Miller, S.G., 1990. Afterword. In A. Memmi, The colonizer and the colonized. Beacon Press: Boston, pp.165–166.

22 Mandela, N.R., 1964. I am prepared to die (statement from the dock at the Rivonia Trial on 20 April). African National Congress. Available at http://www.anc.org.za/3430?t=Famous%20Speeches [Accessed 4 March 2011].

23 Mandela, N.R., 1994, p.12.

24 Lieberfeld, D., 2003. Nelson Mandela: Partisan and peacemaker. Negotiation Journal, July 2003, pp.229–50.

25 Mandela, N.R., 1994, p.25.

26 Ibid, p.60.; Mandela, N.R., 2006, p.24.

27 Ibid.

28 Loomba, A., 1998, pp.32–33, 107–115.

29 Mandela, N.R., 1994, p.316, 319.

30 Anton Lembede, AP Mda, Walter Sisule and Oliver Tambo, among others. Mandela, N.R., 1994, p.112.

31 Giliomee, H. & Mbenga, B. (eds.), 2007, p.299.

32 Mandela, N.R., 1994, p.141; Mandela, N.R., 2006, p.40.

33 Giliomee, H. & Mbenga, B. (eds.), 2007, p.332; Mandela, N.R., 2006, p.48.

34 The razing of Sophiatown and District Six are well-known examples of ‘black spot’ removals.

35 MK decided on sabotage as the preferred form of armed resistance, because it would target the installations of the apartheid state and not ordinary civilians. See Mandela, N.R., 1994, pp.282,336; and Giliomee, H. & Mbenga, B. (eds.), 2007, p.335.

36 Mandela, N.R., 1994, pp.371–373.

37 Miller, S.G., 1990, p.157.

38 Memmi, A., 1965, p.30; Fanon, F., 1998. The wretched of the earth. In E.C. Eze (ed.), African philosophy: An anthology. Massachusetts: Blackwell, pp.228–233.

39 Cawood, S., 2011, p.11.

40 Aristotle, 1991. On rhetoric: A theory of civic discourse. (Trans. G.A. Kennedy.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.48.

41 Aristotle, 2012. The art of rhetoric. London: Collins Classics.; Garver, E., 2009. Aristotle on the kinds of rhetoric. Rhetorica, 27(1), pp.3–4.

42 Gustainis, J.T., 1982. The generic criticism of social movement rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 12(4), pp.251–60.

43 Rybacki, K. & Rybacki, D., 1991, pp. 192–198.

44 The dynamics of the rhetorical imprint is explored in my doctoral thesis titled: The rhetorical imprint of Nelson Mandela as reflected in public speeches: 1950 – 2004. Promoter: Prof. J.C. de Wet.

45 Osborn, M., 1967. Archetypal metaphor in rhetoric: The light-dark family. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 53(2), p.115; Jung, C.G., 1928. Contributions to analytical psychology. (Trans. H.G. Baynes and C.F. Baynes.) London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp.118, 279–281.

46 Osborn, M., 1967, p.116.

47 No easy walk to freedom is the title to his speech as President to the Transvaal Conference of the ANC on 21 September 1953; Long walk to freedom is the title of this authorised 1994 autobiography.

48 Liberation – a Journal of Democratic Discussion – was published in Johannesburg from 1953 to 1959, with D. Tloome as editor. Nelson Mandela wrote a number of articles for this journal.




49 Mandela, N.R., 1962. Address by Nelson Mandela on behalf of the ANC Delegation. Delivered at the Conference of the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA). 12 January 1962. Addis Ababa. Available at http://www.anc.org.za/4297 [Accessed 4 March 2011].

50 Mandela, N.R., 1964.

51 Mandela, N.R., 1951. Presidential Address. Presented at the Annual Conference of the African National Congress Youth League. December 1951. Available at http://db.nelsonmandela.org/speeches/pub_view.asp?pg=item&ItemID=NMS001&txtstr=december%201951 [Accessed 4 March 2011].

52 Mandela, N.R., 1961. The struggle is my life. Press Statement by Nelson Mandela issued by the ANC in London. 26 June 1961. Available at http://www.anc.org.za/4502 [Accessed on 4 March 2011].

53 Mandela, N.R., 1964.

54 Mandela, N.R., 1962. Black man in a white court: Nelson Mandela’s First Court Statement. African National Congress. 28 October 1962. Available at http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=3763 [Accessed 4 March 2011].

55 Mandela, N.R., 1994, p.430.

56 Mandela, N.R., 2010. Conversations with myself. London: Macmillan, p.53.; Mandela, N.R., 2006, p.62. Also see Nehru, J., 1942. From Lucknow to Tripuri. In J. Nehru, The Unity of India. Collected Writings 1937 – 1940. New York: The John Day Company, pp.86–146

57 Mandela, N.R., 1953. No easy walk to freedom. Presidential Address to the ANC (Transvaal) Congress. 21 September 1953. Available at http://db.nelsonmandela.org/speeches/pub_view.asp?pg=item&ItemID=NMS001&txtstr=no%20easy%20walk%20to%20freedom [Accessed 4 March 2011].

58 Nehru, J., 1942, p.131.

59 King, M.L., Jr, 2005a. I Have a Dream (28 August 1963). In Cambridge Editorial Partnership (ed.), Speeches that changed the world. London: Quercus Publishing. pp.150-153.

60 King, M.L., Jr, 2005b. I Have Seen the Promised Land (3 April 1968). In Cambridge Editorial Partnership (ed.), Speeches that Changed the World. London: Quercus. pp.154-155. Publishing.; Cawood, S., 2011, p.271.

61 King, M.L., Jr, 2005a, pp.150–153.

62 King, M.L., Jr, 2005b, pp.154–155.

63 Charteris-Black, J., 2005. Politicians and rhetoric: The persuasive power of metaphor. London: Palgrave Macmillan, p.34.

64 Ibid, p.42.


The ‘Recalcitrant Other’ The Rhetorical Identity and Struggle of Nelson Mandela

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