Rhetoric in African Fiction- a Postcolonial Analysis to Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat, Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross and Wizard of the Crow

Rhetoric in African Fiction- a Postcolonial Analysis to Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat, Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross and Wizard of the Crow

Background to the Study

Rhetoric is the ancient art of argumentation and discourse from primordial Greece to the twentyfirst century. Rhetoric has been central to Western and African education, filling the need to train public speakers, orators and writers to move audiences to action with arguments. In Western perspective, the word ‗rhetoric‘ originated from the Greek word ‗rhetor‘ which means speaker and it is often seen as the art of public speaking. In Africa, from time immemorial, rhetoric originated from orality and this anchors its significance on persuasive verbal expressions. The thrust of rhetoric quite often is the intellectual ability of a speaker to compose and arrange a speech that would be persuasive through its intellectual, emotional and dramatic appeal to an audience. Western rhetoric in its historic framework had its origin in ancient Greece in the fifth century B.C. The earliest known studies of it come from Greek philosophers of the classical period; the Sophists, Aristotle and then, in the Roman world, Cato, Cicero and Quintilian. For Marcus Cicero, classical rhetoric has five canons: invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery. ―Invention‖ referred to the content of a speech; whether it is persuasive, and logical or appealing. The second part is ―arrangement‖ of the speech into a given order. The third part is ―style‖. This refers to diction (word choice) and composition that makes use of rhythm and figurative language. The other two canons often made popular by Aristotle are ―memory‖ which meant memorization of the speech for oratory purpose and delivery signified by the control of one‘s 2 voice, tone and gesture when speaking. Rafey Habib explains the origin of rhetoric with these words The art of rhetoric was formally founded in 476 BC by a native of Syracuse, Corax, whose student Tisias transmitted his master‘s teachings to the mainland. Rhetoric was an integral part of the political process in ancient Greece, especially in Athens and Syracuse of the fifth century BC… On the ability to speak persuasively could depend the entire future of a State, family or individual. On rhetoric, often hung the balance of life or death, war or peace, prosperity or destruction, freedom or slavery. (24) In ancient Athens, a group of professional teachers, called Sophists (from ‗Sophos‘, meaning ―wise‖) emerged. They taught art for use in the courts, the legislature, and political forums, as well as for philosophical reflection and debate. Through their influence, rhetoric came to assume a central role in Greek education. The most influential of the Sophists were Protagoras, Gorgias, Antiphon, Lysias, and Isocrates (Habib 24). Chinwe Okechukwu remarks that ―rhetoric has been seen as the bedrock of an organized society from the classical times to the present. It embraces the different arms of government in society, including the judicial, the political and the ceremonial‖ (45). The views captured here clearly define the nature and manifestation of rhetoric by the Greeks, Romans and Britons but against the backdrop of this explanation, other postcolonial communities of the world have rhetoric and have been interested in studying and projecting their rhetoric in diverse forms and perceptions of humanity. However, Mbanefo Ogene avers that ―rhetoric started from the oral tradition before it developed to the written. The early Greece scholars started from the oral tradition before they evolved a system of the written text‖ (98). Duckworth succinctly stressed that: 3 Indeed, the search

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