ABSTRACT
This chapter examines election rally songs from Nigeria and Lesotho dating from the 1950s to 2012. These songs depend in part for their rhetorical impact on boast, warrant and pseudo-warrant; the paper focuses especially, however, on their use of another rhetorical strategy, invective, and explores the question of whether the use of invective can be regarded as being socially divisive, a question that can only be satisfactorily answered by taking into account the reception of the songs at the point of performance. Beginning with texts from southern Nigeria in the 1950s, the discussion moves to Lesotho (2012) and then to northern Nigeria (1983), a structure that is designed to demonstrate progressively more extreme instances of invective. The theoretical underpinning of the paper is drawn from the work of Raymond Williams, Norman Fairclough and V. N. Volosinov. While there is a discussion of the pitfalls involved in applying an epistemology drawn from the global North to texts from Africa, the paper is essentially a contribution to a growing body of work that applies rhetoric studies to African texts.
