The grammar and rhetoric of African subjectivity: ethics, image, and language

ABSTRACT

This article advances existing studies on ethics, image, and language in rhetoric by offering three key interventions. First, ethics, a reasonable rhetorical practice that enables informed decisions, does not respond to colonial ethics that constructs West Africans as nonhumans, hence the need for an onto-logical ethics that affirms West Africans as reasonably human. Second, decoloniality offers an alternative visual rhetorical model to the common visual perception of Africa that blurs Africans and their essences, a gap that often denies Africans their subject positions, and that almost always gets theorized away in visual rhetoric and communication studies. Third, colonial language—however Africans claim to own it for their rhetorical and creative purposes—almost always expands and advances its linguistic imprint and empiric presence on the users of the language in Africa.

KEYWORDS:

• ethics
• grammar
• rhetoric
• colonial language
• Africa

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the guest editors, the anonymous reviewers, and the editorial team for guiding me through the writing process. I am indebted to their attention to details, thorough editing and review, and useful suggestions, all of which transformed and clarified my argument in this article.

Notes

1 Pieter Coetzee and Abraham Roux, eds., The African Philosophy Reader (London: Routledge, 1998), 208–209; 337–40; 369–71.

2 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 42–43.

3 Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti, “Colonial Mentality,” track 2 on Sorrow Tears and Blood (Nigeria: Kalakuta, 1977). Kuti was a popular music artiste who blended jazz, blues, and funk with traditional Yoruba music to create a new music genre known as Afrobeat.

4 Kwasi Wiredu, “The Moral Foundations of an African Culture,” in The African Philosophy Reader, ed. Pieter Coetzee and Abraham Roux (London: Routledge, 1998), 338–39; Kwame Gyekye, “Person and Community in African Thoughts,” in The African Philosophy Reader, ed. Pieter Coetzee and Abraham Roux (London: Routledge, 1998), 355; Segun Gbadegesin, “Ènìyàn: The Yoruba Concept of a Person,” in The African Philosophy Reader, ed. Pieter Coetzee and Abraham Roux (London: Routledge, 1998), 208–209.

5 Ajume Wingo, “Akan Philosophy of the Person,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Department of Philosophy, 2017), n.p. Wingo’s take on Wiredu’s ethical view on onipa, which refers to both “person” and “human,” reaffirms the distinction between “human” (biological) and “person” (ethical). Based on this distinction, Wingo claims that one is always human, and that “there is no such thing as becoming a human.” My argument in this section has largely relied on Wingo’s reflection on Wiredu’s view, which also applies to Gbadegesin’s concept of eniyan in Yoruba and Gyekye’s view on onipa in Akan.

6 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 42–43.

7 Ibid.

8 Moses E. Ochonu, “Looking for Race: Pigmented Pasts and Colonial Mentality in ‘Non-Racial’ Africa,” in Relating Worlds of Racism: Dehumanisation, Belonging, and the Normativity of European Whiteness, ed. Philomena Essed, Karen Farquharson, Kathryn Pillay, and Elisa Joy White (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 11.

9 Tejumola Olaniyan, “The Cosmopolitan Nativist: Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and the Antinomies of Postcolonial Modernity,” Research in African Literatures 32, no. 2 (2001): 81. Olaniyan wrote extensively on Kuti, including his transition from native language into Pidgin, a lingua franca that draws from English, Portuguese, and African languages.

10 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “Metaphysical Empire: Language as a War Zone,” posted March 31, 2014, by UCI Open, YouTube, https://youtu.be/YuynDZOsfiY; Salikoko Mufwene, “Colonization, Indigenization, and the Differential Evolution of English: Some Ecological Perspectives,” World Englishes 34, no. 1 (2015): 6–21.

11 Cecil Blake, African Origins of Rhetoric (London: Routledge, 2010); Maulana Karenga, “Nommo, Kawaida, and Communicative Practice: Bringing Good into the World,” in Understanding African American Rhetoric: Classical Origins to Contemporary Innovations, ed. Ronald L. Jackson II and Elaine B. Richardson (London: Routledge, 2003), 3–22; Maat, the Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt: A Study in Classical African Ethics (Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 2006); Odù Ifá: The Ethical Teachings (Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 1999); Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change, rev. ed. (Chicago: African American Images, 2003).

12 Marouf Hasian and Rulon Wood, “Critical Museology, (Post)Colonial Communication, and the Gradual Mastering of Traumatic Pasts at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA),” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 2 (2010): 128–49; Christraud M. Geary, Postcards from Africa: Photographers of the Colonial Era, Selections from the Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts Publications, 2018); Toussaint Nothias, “‘Rising’, ‘Hopeful’, ‘New’: Visualizing Africa in the Age of Globalization,” Visual Communication 13, no. 3 (2014): 323–39.

13 Abiodun Salawu, “Indigenous Language Media: A Veritable Tool for African Language Learning,” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 1, no. 1 (2006): 86–95; Phillip Mpofu and Abiodun Salawu, “Culture of Sensationalism and Indigenous Language Press in Zimbabwe: Implications on Language Development,” African Identities 16, no. 3 (2018): 333–48; Albert Chibuwe and Abiodun Salawu, “Mainstream English Language Press Journalists’ Perceptions towards the Indigenous-Language Press in Zimbabwe,” African Journalism Studies 41, no. 3 (2020): 1–19; Leketi Makalela, “Black South African English on the Radio,” World Englishes 32, no. 1 (2013): 93–107.

14 Fanon The Wretched of the Earth, 43.

15 Ibid., 41.

16 Oyekan Owomoyela, Yoruba Proverbs (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 249.

17 Wingo, “Akan Philosophy of the Person.”

18 John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (New York: Praeger, 1969), 106. See also Ifeanyi Menkiti, “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought,” in African Philosophy: An Introduction, 3rd ed., ed. Richard A. Wright (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 171–82; Wiredu, “The Moral Foundations of an African Culture.”

19 John Hutchison, “Onipa Nni Aye,” in African Studies Collection (Madison: University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center, n.d.), https://search.library.wisc.edu/digital/AT7NN2RN7PMQR383.

20 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); Plato, Phaedrus, trans. W. C. Helmbold and W. G. Rabinowitz (New York: Macmillan, 1986).

21 Richard M. Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (London: Routledge, 2016), 3–39.

22 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (n.p.: Digireads.com Publishing, 2017).

23 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2013); Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014).

24 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2012).

25 “Twi Proverbs I: 32 in Total,” African Manners, July 7, 2012, https://africanmanners.wordpress.com/2012/07/07/twi-proverbs-i-32-in-total/.

26 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 41.

27 For clarification on the meanings of evil in Akan, see Kwame Gyekye, “Akan Concept of Person,” International Philosophical Quarterly 18, no. 3 (1978): 277–87.

28 Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 51.

29 Ibid.; On the Postcolony (Johannesburg, South Africa: Wits University Press, 2015), 4.

30 Cara A. Finnegan, “Social Engineering, Visual Politics, and the New Deal: FSA Photography in Survey Graphic,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 3, no. 3 (2000): 333–62; “Documentary as Art in U.S. Camera,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2001): 37–68; Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2003); Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

31 Hasian and Wood, “Critical Museology, (Post)Colonial Communication, and the Gradual Mastering of Traumatic Pasts at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA)”; Geary, Postcards from Africa; Nothias, “‘Rising’, ‘Hopeful’, ‘New.’”

32 Annetta Fotopoulos, “Understanding the Zodiac Saga in China: World Cultural Heritage, National Humiliation, and Evolving Narratives,” Modern China 41, no. 6 (2015): 603–30.

33 Zhichang Xu and Farzad Sharifian, “Cultural Conceptualizations of Chinese Zodiac Animals in Chinese English,” World Englishes 37, no. 4 (2018); 590–606; Fotopoulos, “Understanding the Zodiac Saga in China”; Paul S. F. Yip, Joseph Lee, and Y. B. Cheung, “The Influence of the Chinese Zodiac on Fertility in Hong Kong SAR,” Social Science & Medicine 55, no. 10 (2002): 1803–12.

34 Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 53.

35 Achille Mbembe, “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive,” Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, 2015, https://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/Achille%20Mbembe%20-%20Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20and%20the%20Question%20of%20the%20Archive.pdf.

36 Obiajunwa Wali, “The Dead End of African Literature?” Transition 10 (1963): 13–15; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: J. Currey, 1986).

37 Chinua Achebe, “English and the African Writer,” Transition 75/76 (1997): 342; Ada Uzoamaka Azodo, “Ada Azodo Talk ‘Creative Writing and Literary Activism’ with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,” Journal of the African Literature Association 2, no. 1 (2007): 146–51.

38 Mufwene, “Colonization, Indigenization, and the Differential Evolution of English”; Ayo Bamgbose, “Torn between the Norms: Innovations in World Englishes,” World Englishes 17, no. 1 (1998): 1–14; David Jowitt, Nigerian English (Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2019).

39 Eyamba G. Bokamba, “African Englishes and Creative Writing,” in The Handbook of World Englishes, 2nd. ed., ed. Cecil L. Nelson, Zoya G. Proshina, and Daniel R. Davis (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019), 173–97.

40 Salawu, “Indigenous Language Media”; Mpofu and Salawu, “Culture of Sensationalism and Indigenous Language Press in Zimbabwe”; Chibuwe and Salawu, “Mainstream English Language Press Journalists’ Perceptions towards the Indigenous-Language Press in Zimbabwe”; Makalela, “Black South African English on the Radio.”

41 Danica Salazar, “Release Notes: Nigerian English,” Oxford English Dictionary: The Definitive Records of the English Language (blog), January 13, 2020, https://public.oed.com/blog/nigerian-english-release-notes/.

42 Danica Salazar, “South African Additions to the OED,” Oxford English Dictionary: The Definitive Records of the English Language (blog), December 13, 2018, https://public.oed.com/blog/south-african-additions-oed/; Penny Silva, “South African English,” Oxford English Dictionary: The Definitive Records of the English Language (blog), August 17, 2012, https://public.oed.com/blog/south-african-english/.

43 Salazar, “Release Notes.”

44 This list is inexhaustive, as it is not the priority of this project to describe and analyze most/all of them. Readers may visit the OED blog, which regularly updates its entries. See OED, “Welcome to the OED Blog,” https://public.oed.com/blog/; see also Salazar, “Release Notes.”

45 Wali, “The Dead End of African Literature?”

46 Ngũgĩ, “Metaphysical Empire.”

47 HARDtalk, “HARDtalk Ngugi Wa Thiong’o Part 1,” posted July 23, 2013, by LudVan 2 77, YouTube, https://youtu.be/A9iNMIG5TH8.

48 Salazar, “Release Notes.”

49 Sara Spary, “From ‘Kannywood’ to ‘Rubbing Minds’—Oxford English Dictionary Adds 29 Nigerian Words and Phrases,” CNN, January 29, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/29/africa/nigerian-words-added-to-english-dictionary-scli-intl-gbr/index.html.

50 Mufwene, “Colonization, Indigenization, and the Differential Evolution of English,” 6.

51 Benjamin Haas, “Chinese Museum Accused of Racism over Photos Pairing Africans with Animals,” Guardian, October 14, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/14/chinese-museum-accused-of-racism-over-photos-pairing-africans-with-animals. See also Kenneth Tan, “Incredibly Racist Chinese Museum Exhibit Displays Photos of Africans Alongside Animals,” Shanghaiist, May 5, 2018, https://shanghaiist.com/2017/10/12/racist-african-exhibit/.