ABSTRACT
In the early 1990s, when South Africa emerged from a culture of secrecy into democratic openness, “transparency” and “accountability” became the new tropes by which state and public officeholders began measuring their own newly acquired rhetoric. One could have believed in a pure, miraculous birth of democratic speech, borne upon the baptismal fonts by the sacrament and unction of the first general elections of 1994. The “rhetorical link”1 seemed to have been crystallized, in the tradition of Rousseau’s Social Contract,2 by one Legislator, Nelson Mandela.
