Ebook: TRUTH IN POLITICS Rhetorical Approaches to Democratic Deliberation in Africa and beyond

The purpose of this volume is to try and acclimatize “rhetoric” to the philosophical scene in South Africa, and more in general in Africa as a whole, and to contribute a scholarly reflection on the emergence of public deliberation in the South African democracy by providing analyses from the standpoint of rhetoric.
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) offered a particularly good start. It was a massive exercise in deliberation, a telling of “truth”, an exposé on a people’s diverse visions on events and history. Elsewhere, I have proposed a rhetorical reading of the TRC as a phenomenon of public deliberation. My view of the matter may be summarized as follows. On the one hand, there was the Platonic drift of the Commissioners – they wanted to unveil “the truth” of apartheid; their stance was itself rooted in religious or ideological beliefs impervious to the Arendt model. On the other hand, the People, in their submissions, held high the civic duty of “telling stories”, of exemplifying multivocality, thus turning out to be excellent Sophists (Salazar 2002). The people offered testimonies, they opened up a stunning treasury of words, narrations, opinions onto “who did what for what reason”. They acted as true Aristotelians.This takes us to the subject matter of the present collection. Four papers (Part One) tackle, from four different angles, the re-telling of private truths about a public regimen of affairs in front of a public commission. In Part Two, public deliberation and the fashioning of truth are approached from a variety of perspectives, examples and situations of “rhetorical democracy” outside South Africa. This leads on to public deliberation as the latter plays itself out in political issues, such as the African Renaissance. Part Three attempts to offer examples of how rhetoric may be brought to bear upon politics in order to understand how dialogue between different levels of agency creates democratic negotiation and, in the process, shapes policy.The volume closes on a philosophical analysis of the “ethical” dimension inherent to public deliberation as well as to the contest of beliefs; and on an examination of the volume’s contents in the light of long-standing concerns of African philosophy, and of Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie.