ABSTRACT
When I became president of the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) I had no premonition that proofreading the 1998 proceedings manuscript would be completed while I was a fellow at the Centre for Rhetoric Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. During August and September 1998, I observed firsthand an emerging democracy that only eight years ago was still disentangling itself from the habits and bureaucracies of the apartheid regime that had for so long silenced a multitude of voices. An entire generation of intellectuals, and hosts of ordinary citizens of conscience simply disappeared, and with them any public trace of the many antiapartheid rhetorics that quietly persisted within universities and among international political and academic colleagues. It was a privilege to be invited to witness many of the themes comprised in Rhetoric, the Polls, and the Global Village. The goals even now being formulated within the new South African Parliament include a number of projects discussed at the 1998 Pittsburgh RSA conference: language policy, educational reform and diversity, linguistic and rhetorical pluralism, and retaining national identity and coherence amidst rhetorics of globalization. The new South Africa seeks to create a unified society not defined in terms of racial, ethnic, or linguistic polarities. At the same time, it is forging a state and a culture that can recognize as equal-in Parliament, in education, and in print and broadcast media-over twelve linguistic and cultural groups. The European colonial languages, English and Afrikaans, are now joined by indigenous African languages-some written, most still largely oral. Television news broadcasts alternate among nine languages. Television and radio broadcasts of routine arts and news programs are transmitted in at least two and usually more spoken languages. Each of the languages now visible and audible in South Africa is also a rhetorical tradition, a set of practices that must be learned, understood, and honored by interlocutors and auditors. Among the current projects of the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Rhetoric Studies is the creation of materials that will assist multirhetorical exchanges in government, classroom, and media.
